Argument

In a finite, involuted world, the world of the here and now, are imprisoned men confronted by glimmerings of the not-here and bearing in their eyes the knowledge of the not-now. It is a tunneled world they live in, and both sound and thought, matter and aspiration, are driven back upon themselves; they cannot escape and are frustrated. Here men stand with their hands, upraised—not in adoration of the gods but to protect themselves from the material forces which would undo them. In their very resistance they are degraded. But in their resistance, too, they are noble, for there are others sitting and standing beside them that are already too brutalized to resist; time and the forces of nature move by them without meaning: stolidly they sit in the earth, symbols of the destroyed and the destroying. On the streets they are not seen, in the sunlight; only here, in the accursed earth do they congregate—evil memories and forebodings that would be forgotten by the others, the real, who though harried by hunger and the obduracy of their surroundings, still are staunch, still hold up their hands in defiance.

What do we do, we men? We read the stories of ourselves, but our thoughts are on something outside ourselves, something to be possessed and which will give us forgetfulness. For always our comrade death is implicit, hinting his betrayal. Ever to each he turns some facet of his darkness. One will die, and tonight. Another, in woman’s compassion and in beauty, knowing death as an ultimate hatefulness, will meanwhile spurn it by struggling against the lesser. Another is the self-killer, whose hand the involuted world has driven back into his skull. Another is a woman mourning—after her child’s death and thus her own; of this there is no philosophy. Another already lies in the grave, but is in our company. Another is the watcher, knowing death with the knowledge of all. His mind too is driven back into its caverns by the walls of the repellant universe; and he sees that this which confounds us is as breath in the nostrils, not a severed ill but parcel of this lost road of time on which we move, this tunnel we follow astray.