• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6179 0

with Dr. Scheldt I took my small daughters, Lish and Mary, to the Christmas pageant after all, outmaneu-vered by Denise, who had put them on the phone in tears. Unexpectedly, however, the pageant was very stirring. I do love theatricals, with their breaking voices, missed cues, and silly costumes. All the fine costumes were in the audience. Hundreds of excited kiddies were brought by their Mamas, many of these Mamas being tigresses of the subtlest sort. And dressed, arrayed, perfumed to a degree! Rip van Winkle was given as a curtain raiser. To me it was immensely relevant. It was all very well to blame the dwarfs for making Rip drunk, but he had his own good reasons for passing out. The weight of the sense world is too heavy for some people, and getting heavier all the time. His twenty years of sleep, let me tell you, went straight to my heart. My heart was sensitive today—worry, anticipated problems, and remorse made it tender and vulnerable. An idiotic old lecher was leaving two children to follow an obvious gold digger to corrupt Europe. As one of the few fathers in the audience I felt how wrong this was. I was encompassed by feminine judgment. The views of all these women were unmistakably expressed. I saw for instance that the mothers resented the portrayal of Mrs. van Winkle, clearly the American Bitch in an early version. Myself, I reject all such notions about American Bitches. The mothers, however, were angry, they smiled but were hostile. The kids, though, were innocent, and they clapped and cheered when Rip was told that his wife had died of apoplexy during a fit of rage.

I was thinking of the higher significance of these things— naturally. For me the real question was how Rip would have spent his time if the dwarfs had not put him to sleep. He had an ordinary human American right, of course, to hunt and fish and roam the woods with his dog—much like Huckleberry Finn in the Territory Ahead. The following question was more intimate and difficult: what would I have done if I hadn’t been asleep in spirit for so long? Amid the fluttering and squealing and clapping and writhing of little children, so pure of face, so fragrant (even the small gases released, inevitably, by a crowd of children were pleasant if you breathed them in a paternal spirit), so savable, I forced myself to stop and answer—I was obliged to do it. If you believed one of the pamphlets Dr. Scheldt had given me to read, this sleeping was no trifling matter. Our unwillingness to come out of the state of sleep was the result of a desire to evade an impending revelation. Certain spiritual beings must achieve their development through men, and we betray and abandon them by this absenteeism, this will-to-snooze. Our duty, said one bewitching pamphlet, is to collaborate with the Angels. They appear within us (as the Spirit called the Maggid manifested himself to the great Rabbi Joseph Karo). Guided by the Spirits of Form, Angels sow seeds of the future in us. They inculcate certain pictures into us of which we are “normally” unaware. Among other things they wish to make us see the concealed divinity of other human beings. They show man how he can cross by means of thought the abyss that separates him from Spirit. To the soul they offer freedom and to the body they offer love. These facts must be grasped by waking consciousness. Because, when he sleeps, the sleeper sleeps. Great world events pass him by. Nothing is momentous enough to rouse him. Decades of calendars drop their leaves on him just as the trees dropped leaves and twigs on Rip. Moreover, the Angels themselves are vulnerable. Their aims must be realized in earthly humanity itself. Already the brotherly love they put into us has been corrupted into sexual monstrosity. What are we doing with each other in the sack? Love is being disgracefully perverted. Then, too, the Angels send us radiant freshness and we, by our own sleeping, make it all dull. And in the political sphere we can hear, semi-conscious though we are, the grunting of the great swine empires of the earth. The stink of these swine