The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [268]
You have a strong superego. You want to accept. But how do you know what you're accepting? You have to be nuts to take it come one come all. Nobody is going to thank you for trying. And you know you're going to ruin yourself ignoring the reality principle and trying to cheer up the dirty scene. You should accept the data of experience. Why don't you read some psychology? It did me a lot of good." "Well, I'll borrow some of your books, since you think it's so important, Only you've got the whole thing wrong already. I'll put it to you as I see it. It can never be right to offer to die, and if that's what the data of experience tell you, then you must get along without them. I also understand what you're driving at about my not being concrete. It's as follows: In the world of today your individual man has to be willing to illustrate a more and more narrow and restricted point of existence. And I am not a specialist." "Well, you tell me you can train birds." Yes, so far that had been my only field of specialization. And it's perfectly true, you have to be one of these spirits that get as if jumped into and driven far and powerfully by a social purpose. If somebody is needed to go and lie under the street, you be it. Or in a mine. Or work out joyrides in the carnival. Or invent names of new candy. Or electroplate babies'. shoes. Or^go around and put cardboard pictures of bims in barbershops or saloons. Or go die in one subdivided role or another, with one or two thoughts, these narrow, persistent ideas of your function. I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you'd be dealing with other experts. You wouldn't care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what's there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla's slogan of "Easy or not at all." Mimi got a big laugh out of my Mexican experiences. "What a ball you've been having," she said. She made me feel unpleasant about Thea; and about Stella she said, "Guys like you make life easy for some women." There hadn't been anything easy for anyone, but you couldn't tell Mimi that. Having gotten the story as she wanted it, she didn't listen to more, but with her push-faced vigor, her broad red mouth stretching and giving out with her helicon or hunting-hom voice, she let me have it almost the same as Clem. I'd better be cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I didn't want to; because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture--the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to. be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true. Maybe she exaggerated her rake-the-heavens wrath and went beyond how she truly felt. However, there were blue marks of worry beneath her eyes these days. When Arthur came around she talked about money and jobs. Four times out of five she changed the subject to that as soon as he showed up. There was a certain job she kept after him to take. But he said, "Why, it's a farce!" And gently began to laugh in his dark way, crowfooted. "The money's no farce." "Oh, please, Mimi. Don't be absurd.",/ "There'd be practically no work connected with it." However, he made it seem absolutely impossible. I began to think it was a job I might put in for myself, if qualified. I met Arthur out walking and I asked him why he didn't want it. It was a cool afternoon, and he was wearing cap and coat. He had lost much weight and was very bony, his shoulders up sharp, so that I was impressed with his resemblance to his uncle Dingbat and how he had subdued the same inheritance by a different