The Listener

  “I am tired of tears and laughter,

  Of men that laugh and weep;

  Of what may come hereafter

  For men that sow to reap;

  I am weary of days and hours,

  Blown buds of barren flowers,

  Desires and dreams and powers

  And everything but sleep.

  “I drink,” said Alexander Damon, “for sleep. Only for sleep. To forget.”

  He settled deeply in the chair. He was exhausted, yet he felt released. He said, “ ‘Blown buds of barren flowers’. All my life was barren. And pointless. And without meaning.”

  He looked at the curtains again. “I am not whimpering. Everybody’s life is like that. Nobody’s life ever was fruitful. Not even Christ’s. His was the most fruitless of all. Don’t you agree? Two thousand years! And there are no real Christians. When you come down to it, there are no religious people anywhere, are there? Can you imagine them in public relations, or business, or anywhere else, for that matter? The very idea is calamitous. I met a Jewish writer the other day, a young man. A Talmudist, he called himself. He was actually writing a book about his ‘God’. I told him he’d never get a publisher for such a naive idea. He said, ‘I certainly will. We need a new affirmation, every generation, of the presence of God in our lives’. Everyone at the table laughed. I’m afraid that I laughed the hardest of all. Moira — she is my present wife — was very indignant. She told me I’d been drinking too much. But all my wives have said that, though they understood I am not an alcoholic. They make, as the proletariat say, a federal case of it.”

  The wild hunger moved through every organ of his body, demanding, screaming. He moistened his lips. He would leave almost immediately. It was late, very late. But he could begin his slow, steadfast drinking as soon as he got back to his hotel. Be quiet, he told his urgent body. His thirsty, hungering body that would never be satisfied or contented. That was always waiting for something.

  The white light and the silent walls waited.

  “My father,” said Alexander Damon, quietly mopping his face and hands, “was a very successful lawyer in New York.

  Unfortunately, he died when I was only fourteen. I missed a father’s influence. My mother was one of those Victorian ladies with a high sense of rectitude and duty and responsibility. The minister was always at our house. My father used to make fun of him when he left, he was such a simple soul, very naive and earnestly full of faith. ‘Louise,’ Father would say to my mother, ‘how can you endure that droning nonsense? After all, you are an intelligent person for a woman. We aren’t living in the Dark Ages any longer, you know’. But my mother would say, ‘Don’t be silly, Edgar. If you’d listen to Mr. Thayer you’d find some direction, some purpose, some meaning in your life. You would know why you had been born’. I remember my father laughing. He was a very distinguished man, really, and civilized and adult. He would kiss my mother and say, ‘You’re my meaning in life’. She’d become very disagreeable to him then and push him away and warn him, ‘Alex is listening. I don’t want him to be as frivolous as you’.

  “You can see now what a wretched influence my mother had on my life. If she’d let us alone — my father and me — we’d have come to understand each other, I suppose. Not that he was particularly interested in me; he was interested in enjoying himself and being successful, and we had what they called ‘fine wine cellars’ in those days.

  “But I’ve gone over all this with my analyst; I could repeat the whole story by heart. Which I am doing, I am afraid. When my father died — I forgot to tell you — he killed himself. He hung himself, without warning, without even leaving a note, in his library one night. One of the servants found him the next morning.”

  Alexander was sweating profusely. He took off his coat; it seemed to hamper him and grasp him, like clutching arms. He tore it from his body and threw it from him.

  “My analyst,” he said in a faint, weakened voice, “told me that he suspected that it was my mother’s frigidity that drove my father to his death. I don’t quite believe that. We found out later that he had quite a number of women who were consoling him. But of course he had no consolation at home, where everything was geared to finding out why you were born, what you were to do here, and to prepare for what, as our minister said, was ‘our life hereafter’. In that gloomy atmosphere — can you blame my father for killing himself?”

  He waited for an answer. But none came. He looked at the walls. They had an air of listening, of weighing. He shook his head impatiently.

  “I’m sorry that I said ‘gloomy atmosphere’. It wasn’t really. My mother was an amusing and pretty woman. She had a peaceful air about her; she was very popular in New York. Strange that I should have given you the wrong impression that she was a severe and stern sort of woman. She wasn’t. She just seemed to have a meaning in her life. In all justice — I must remember to make a note of that when I next talk to my analyst — I’m afraid I misled him. I told him that my mother was a sort of tall Queen Mary, all propriety and uprightness. At least I think I told him that. But no, now that I think of it, he suggested it himself! Apparently he has numbered slots where he inserts people with a click. I let him do that about my mother. What did it matter, anyway? It may have been misleading — I don’t know. After all, I was my own problem, not my mother’s. It is easier sometimes to let people think that what they believe is the truth.

  “My mother died shortly after I was graduated. She had been sick for some time, though I never heard her complain. Just before she died she said to me, ‘Alex, there is a meaning why you were born. You must try to find it, not just in your work, but in yourself. Your father never found that meaning, God help him’.

  “I had never forgiven her for my father’s death. I think perhaps that I never forgave him, either! He loved no one except my mother. Of course he was interested in me, but my mother was first. He was a man of wide interests. When you consider my mother, who, though popular and pretty and home-loving and devoted — she wanted several children — was a somewhat shallow woman, it would make anyone wonder why my father thought she was earth and high heaven. And why, thinking that, he killed himself.”

  Alexander Damon stood up. “I know why he killed himself. He found no meaning in life. None at all. And neither do I.” He rubbed his hands over and over. “What meaning is there, for anyone?

  “Let me tell you about my stupid wives, who all resembled my mother in one way or another. (My analyst has been very interested in that.) At first they seemed sparkling and interesting to me. They offered a sense of excitement, of something about to happen. But invariably, after a few years, they became dull to me, and pointless.

  “Perhaps it was my work, too, that accentuated it all. I’d see my finished — structure — and feel flat and empty as death. Then another would begin. All those buildings. Repetition. Everything was repetition until I’d feel myself going mad inside. Once, when I was younger, I thought that hell must be like that. Repetition. Working, planning, struggling, completion. Then begin again. Repetition. If the repetition had had any meaningfulness, I’d have been contented. But it didn’t. For what is a man born? To throw up more and more buildings, more and more offices, more and more apartment houses? For what? Tell me, in God’s name, for what?”

  He began to pace with agitation up and down the room. “Like bees. Like ants. Surely a man is more than a bee or an ant! Isn’t he? Surely what he does will make a mark on the world? But only six years ago I saw one of New York’s most famous and beautiful buildings torn down — to make room for one of my icy glass-and-aluminum structures. I thought of the architect who had designed that building, and how he had cared for it, and how he had watched it go up day by day. And then it was torn down. No one even remembers his name. No one cares that he ever lived. It will be that way with me too.

  “Listen! All my wives wanted children! For what? To eat, to sleep, to grow, to go to school, to be graduated — to do what? ‘In the grave there is no remembr
ance’, I once read in the Bible. Why should a man repeat himself in his children? Why bring them into this horror of realization that you have no meaning in your life, that the world has no meaning, that all is repetition, a treadmill, a squirrel cage? No matter what you do! Nothing has any lasting meaning, significance, worth.”

  He stopped and looked at the curtains and did not know that he was crying.

  “Can you understand that? Can you live with that, knowing that you were born for nothing, live for nothing, die for nothing? Why not put an end to it, as my father did, or forget your meaninglessness in drinking?

  “You listen to the noise of the world, and the hurrying and scurrying, and the voices, and the slamming of doors, and you watch the people coming and going, as if what they did was relevant. Then it all takes on a quality of nightmare, of hell. There’s no escape, except in drinking. I can understand why people take drugs too. It’s the despair of the thing, the hopelessness. Oh, it’s all right when you are young! You are full of ginger; you are going to accomplish something. Accomplish what? When you become successful you’ve reached the end of the road. After that — you only repeat yourself.

  “I’ve tried to tell Moira that. (She resembles my mother even more than my first wives did.) And she says, ‘Why, you work, of course, not just for your own fulfillment. You work for God. You put God in your work; you try to help Him find the pattern in what you do and what He wants you to do, even if it is only raising potatoes or buildings. It is all of one pattern’.

  “You can see how utterly absurd she is. Just like my other wives. ‘Do you think this world is all there is?’ she says. ‘This is only the beginning of your work. How you do it here will result in what you will do after you die. You’re just like a child in the first grade. You think the first grade is all there is, and there’s no higher grade after it. But you — you’re flunking even the first grade’. ”

  Alexander moved closer to the curtain, almost within touching distance.

  “And now you see why I must divorce Moira, too, and why I drink.

  “Oh, God! What meaning is there in life? Do you find a meaning in yours, listening to all this babbling? You listen! For what purpose? What did you find of meaning in yours, in the world, or any world hereafter, if there is any?”

  His hand involuntarily reached out and touched the button.

  The curtains fled aside, and he saw the light and who stood in it, listening. He stepped back. He looked away. He wiped his face. He looked again and stood looking and thinking for a long time.

  “Well, yes,” he said slowly. “I see what you mean and what Moira means. You’ve worked a long time, haven’t you? Repetition. Endless years of it. Repetition. But eventually — yes, I suppose so. What you do does have meaning.”

  He sat down in the marble chair, his elbow on the arm, his chin in his hand. He was no longer exhausted and driven, or hungry or desperate, or full of craving. He continued to contemplate the man before him, his face moved and listening.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do see what you mean. And now I know it’s my fault that my life has no zest, no significance, no value, and why I married over and over looking for something I lacked in myself.

  “Men like me, millions of men like me everywhere, have made the world faceless, because we have no features of our own, no real potency, but only pretensions which we call flair and style, and attitudes instead of movement. How did we come to be born, so many of us? Did an ugly, industrial, utilitarian age breed us, so that there is no variety in us, no pillared glory, no power, no real poetry, no color? Or did we make this barren age and all its glittering horrors, and ease, and too much idle, unfulfilled time? We are surrounded by the hugest of machines, which do all our work, and they’ve castrated us. We are without virility in our custom-made clothing, with our correct manners, our glassy houses which reflect back our smooth faces.

  “Could it be that communism itself is the barbarian’s repudiation of us, though he clumsily envies us? And tries, God help him, to imitate us? We are the men of death, though we don’t make bombs, and deplore the making of them. If we write, we are concerned with form and not substance. If we produce plays, they are of mechanical violence, which does not resemble the emotions of men at all. If we are diplomats, we are not even expert and imaginative liars. We are cliche-makers. Phrase-turners, without sense or magnitude. If we ‘study’ man, as modern philosophers or executives or leaders, we regard him as a ‘unit’ of so many man-hours, or energy, or as a consumer, a belly without a mind.

  “We are men who are sick. Not only factory workers have grown empty on assembly lines because there was no occasion for pride and individuality in their lives. Men like me have made assembly lines of the whole world — everything clicking along smoothly, never out of order, evenly spaced, with a bigger and better event, law, invention or amusement, or novelty popping up immediately after the one before, bland and polished, mechanically efficient and inhuman, easier, more sterile, more lifeless than the last. Even our crises are the crises of the machine. All that is needed is a little more oil, a few more dollars, a turn of the screw, an adjustment of the gears, a few more sparkling bolts, a new surface tension, a newly invented belt that will move things faster. If the barbarian howls at us, he has reason to howl. We give him the horrors, too. What we do can’t satisfy a man’s emotions or his human needs.

  “Look at the buildings I design! They mirror me and my kind. Set on steel piles, glittering like mad with acres of glass, the windows outlined in metal guaranteed never to rust, never to mellow, never to be burnished by weather and use. There is no honest authority in them, the authority of basic wood and stone and brick, the power of the authority of natural things. They are mirages of today, gone in a shatter tomorrow, for they are not set on earth. No soaring splendor, no grace, no emotion, no eloquence, no lifting of the eye — only blank straight lines and gleaming facelessness.

  “We’ve enclosed the wild frontiers and made them safe, and we’ve neatly enfolded their mountains in cellophane and have neatly cut down their forests and have set up neat lawns. That is what the Hottentot wants, we assure everyone earnestly. We never know that he wants, more than anything else, to be treated as a man, a soul. He doesn’t want our germless, frozen food, our impotent way of life, our meaningless way of life, our deadly ‘know-how’. He doesn’t want our collectivized death, our helpless unproductive leisure, our organized fun, our desperate play, our refrigerators, and our lethal machines. He has his own meaning, which we deny, because we have no meaning ourselves.”

  He leaned his head against the cushions. “But you had a meaning, for you loved, and love, man as he is and as he can be — a joyous, free, and valuable soul. The point now is — can you find it in you to love me if I become a man again and not a posture? Can I ask you to help me find the meaning of why I am here and what I must do? Will you give me muscles instead of flair, and bowels instead of style? Will you give me faith instead of fashionable platitudes, and truth instead of lofty lies? I’m not a young man, and I’ve been weakened by my ‘good taste’. If I’m to have flesh and blood again, and decency instead of careful manners, then I’ll need all the courage you can give me. Above all, could you make me love my fellow man instead of devising ways to ‘help’ him become what I am, all for his own good, of course!”

  He stood up, pale but with excitement. He felt young and potent again, and vigorous. “Yes, you can. And will. I can see it in your face. You’ve worked a long time and you are still working, so that alone, if nothing else, gives all of us a reason for being. You wouldn’t have been born, and you wouldn’t have lived, unless there was a profound meaning in it for all of us. Even men like me. You must have met them often in your life. And you meet them every day. Do you pity us a little for our stupidity?”

  He paused. “You don’t know how I despise myself now. I’m going to call Moira when I get back to the hotel and ask her to forgive me and tell her I’m coming home. Do you know that she outraged me when s
he suggested children? That is why I ran from her, to divorce her. I didn’t want deathly replicas of myself! Instinctively I knew what a poseur I was, and how parched inside, and how thirsty and hungry.”

  He moved toward the door. He did not have to remember now that he must move with grace and style. He paused at the door and said: “The ancient Greeks poured out wine in a libation to God. Would you mind very much if I poured out my whiskey in a libation?”

  SOUL ELEVEN

  The Teacher

  And who is there to harm you, if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you suffer anything for justice’ sake, blessed are you. So have no fear of their fear, and do not be troubled.

  I Peter 3:13-14

  The man who sat in the white room with its blue curtains and marble chair was young, but he appeared old, for his color was grayish and weary, his features pinched, his eyes wizened in his tired face. He had a long thin nose with a sharp point, an intelligent and sensitive expression, though it was bitter now, and an intense and embittered mouth. Everything about him was neat and brushed and careful, even if his clothing was cheap, even if his shoes had not cost more than ten dollars. His fine hands were carefully kept, and they moved restlessly on the arms of the chair. He looked at the curtains somberly. “I am not going to give you my name,” he said. “After all, I need my salary and I don’t want whispers to travel back to the school board about my ‘complaints’. Oh yes, I’m a teacher. A teacher must never complain; he must always be dedicated to ‘the children’ and his ‘sacred calling’. Yes, I heard the president of the PTA say it was that — a ‘sacred’ calling. She was wearing a spring hat that cost, at the very least, half of my month’s salary. She beamed at us, all radiance and pink dimples, and congratulated us on having been ‘called’. We smiled back at her in a sickly way; her husband’s income, per month, is more than any of our yearly salaries. I wonder what she is ‘dedicated’ to and what her ‘calling’ is. She thinks that because she gave birth to three staring and impudent children, each a separate curse to his teachers, she has done the noblest thing of all and we should be happy to give our lives to her offspring.