The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [310]
is a manifestation of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your availability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you" are justifying yourself by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified? Hideous Sunday, enemy of humanity. Sunday you're on your own-- free. Free for what? Free to discover what's in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter antagonist. Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions, even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished. This lies behind boredom. But you see the endless vistas." Did I! I was stupefied. I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude. "And I wanted to approach it scientifically," he went on. "So my first project was to study the physiology of boredom. I looked into the muscular fatigue experiments of Jacobson and others and that led me into biochemistry. I knocked out my M. A. in record time, I may add, in cell chemistry. Keeping rat tissues alive in vitro, after Harrison and the technique improved by Carrel. This drew me on to von Wettstein, Leo Loeb, and so forth. How come the simple cells wish for immortality whereas the complex organisms get bored? The cells have the will to persist in their essence..." There ensued certain descriptions which I don't command the physical chemistry to repeat, the kinesis of enzymes and so forth. But the upshot of this was, that as he investigated the irritability of protoplasm he discovered some of the secrets of life. "I'm sure you'll find it hard to believe what happened next. Nobody else has believed it." "You didn't create life!" "In all humility, that's exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out for claiming it." "Why, it's crazy! Are you sure that's what you did?" He said stiffly, "I'm a serious person. My whole existence has been intensely serious. I don't intend to jeopardize my own sanity by making wild claims. I get the same results time after time--protoplasm." "You must be a genius." He didn't offer to deny this. He'd better be one. If he wasn't a genius I was in this boat with a maniac. "I stumbled on this," he said. "I am not God." ' "But couldn't they see you had done it?" "I couldn't get them to. And then the first cells I made lacked two essential powers, the regenerative and the reproductive, and were sterile and fragile forms. But in the last two years I've made a special study of biological organizers. I've been in embryology, and I've made some further discoveries." He had to take a swig of water, for he had talked himself onto dry spittle. Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse continued very strong. "But still you haven't explained what a man of your ability was doing as ship's carpenter on the Mac Manus." "Continuing my experiments." "You mean there was some of that protoplasm aboard?" "As a matter of fact, there was." "And it's floating in the ocean now?" "I'm sure it is." k 505 "And what's going to happen?" "I don't know. It's one of my later forms, a great advance over that earlier, perishable form." "What if a new chain of evolution begins?" "Exactly. What if?" "Something terrible maybe. Damn you guys, you don't care how you fiddle with nature!" I said, feeling extremely angry. "Somebody is going to burn up the atmosphere one day or kill us all with a gas." He conceded that it was not impossible. "Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or