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By Root 529 0

faces that packed the place.—So what! Just speak up if you’ve got any complaint! You can’t?—I could see no reason why they should. As I drank my saké, my drunken babbling was proof enough of my respect and esteem for the mask. I zestfully abused my superiors and boasted what a big shot a friend of a friend of a friend was; in short, it was as if I had become someone other than my real face. Even so, this was a pretty sloppy way of getting drunk. The real face definitely could not get drunk the way the mask did. The best the real face could do was to put on a drunken face. Even dead drunk, it would be only a fraction of the mask, never like the mask itself. If I wished to wipe away name, occupation, family, even official registration, I had merely to resort to a lethal dose of poison.… But the mask was different.… It was prodigious the way it got drunk.… It could become a completely different person even without alcohol.… Like me, as a matter of fact …! Me …? No, this is the mask.… Again the mask had become presumptuous, forgetting all about our truce.… But I was no less tipsy than it.… Could I be responsible for tomorrow’s plans in such a state …? These questions were not pressing, and without realizing it, I went along with the mask’s demand for autonomy.

The mask was growing thicker and thicker. It had grown at last into a concrete fortress that enveloped me; and I crept out into the night streets wrapped in concrete armor, feeling like a member of a heavily equipped hunting party. Through the peepholes, the streets looked like the haunts of deformed stray cats. There they loitered, their noses suspiciously in the air, looking greedy, seeking their own tattered tails and ears. I hid beneath my mask, which had neither name nor status nor age, elated at the security guaranteed me alone. If their freedom were a freedom of frosted glass, then mine was the freedom of flawlessly transparent glass. In an instant, my craving had reached the boiling point, and very soon I should not be able to help having a try at making this freedom materialize. Yes, what we call the goal of life is doubtless the consumption of freedom. People often treat the preservation of freedom as if it were the goal of human existence; but isn’t this merely an illusion, after all, that stems from a chronic lack of freedom? Since people make goals out of such things, they fall into the dilemma of talking beyond the confines of this universe; they become misers, or failing that, religious fanatics—one or the other, at least. Yet even the plans for tomorrow could not themselves be a goal. Since by seducing you I shall try to enlarge the validity of my passport, the plans must rather be thought of as a kind of means to an end. With no regret, I shall use the mask now to its fullest capacity.

EXCURSUS: Of course, this was merely alcoholic sophism. The instant I revealed my love to you, I did not intend to beg you to accept such irrefutable logic for impudently justifying the illicit intercourse, nor did I myself intend to. Precisely because I did not, I was preparing my farewell address to the mask. But what worried me slightly was that I could not help but want to use exactly the same logic even in a sober state.

“The goal does not lie in the results of research, the very process of research is itself the goal.” Yes … words that any researcher would utter as a matter of course. While at first blush they seemed unrelated to my case, I could not help but feel that I was after all saying the same thing as they. The process of research, in short, was merely the expenditure of freedom upon matter. The results of research, on the contrary, by being calculated in terms of value, encourage the preservation of freedom. The point of the words was to warn against the tendency to overemphasize only results and to confuse means and ends. I thought this was a much more enlightened logic, but on reflection what I had put forth was quite like the alcoholic babblings of the mask. I was not at all satisfied with the explanation. Was it not simply that, although I had intended