The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [63]
But what in heaven’s name was a pure goal, uninvolved with the question of means? Interestingly enough, almost all the illegal actions that occurred to me were concerned with money, that is, the illegal transfer of ownership. To give one example, gambling, which is said to be a relatively pure concentration of passion, is termed by psychology an escapist craving. This act attempts to replace a continuous, chronic anxiety with a momentary channeling of that tension—if this is really true, it would surely make no difference at all whether it were escapist or whether it were an expenditure of freedom—however, if one eliminated the give and take of money, gambling would become quite insipid. One gambling experience leads to another, the chain is potentially endless, and the fact that it ultimately becomes habit seems to prove that it is merely the swing of the pendulum between means and ends. Fraud, embezzlement, robbery, counterfeiting—all are inconceivable without the means by which they are committed. Even fellows who appear to disregard the law and behave according to their personal dictates actually belong to a freedomless world surprisingly imbued with wants. Isn’t pure purpose simply an illusion?
For example, carrying off whatever materials I wanted from the storeroom at the Institute by intimidating the guard, or stealing the expense sheets and progress charts of experiments by breaking into the locked files of the administration department—these were practical objectives, typical of me. They were amusing daydreams, good for adolescent television serials, not motivated by greed but by my dissatisfaction with a company that provided only provisional independence under the name of an Institute; but the fact remained that they were means to an end, and furthermore, the role I wanted my mask to play above all would perhaps not be realized. Maybe there would be grounds for further consideration after I had let the mask have its way and I had settled down to this life.
MARGINAL NOTE: Needless to say, as long as no obstacle arose, I intended to go on indefinitely living this double life of the mask and the real face.
Of course, among the various crimes, there was only one that suggested an exceptional possibility. That was arson. In arson many elements are simply means for preserving freedom: receiving the insurance as beneficiary, or destroying evidence after theft, or scheming by a fireman thirsting for fame. And is not almost all calculated arson based on grudge after all, an attempt to recover freedom which has been frozen or snatched away? But I realize that there are also cases of pure incendiarism, which themselves have no value other than the direct satisfaction of a craving—pure incendiarism, where the billowing flames lick at the walls, twist the pillars, pierce the ceiling, and suddenly shoot up to the clouds, oblivious to the milling crowd of curiosity seekers; where the dramatic destruction, the reduction to ashes, of a bit of history, which until then had been in undeniable existence, was food that satisfied a spiritual hunger. It seemed by no means a normal craving. An arsonist is an eccentric by definition. But since the mask was a mask and not bound by a “right” way of doing things, if the expenditure of freedom itself were guaranteed, there was no need to bring normality or abnormality into the question.
But since I myself had no intention of becoming an arsonist, there was no point in further discussion. As I threaded my way through the alleys between the main streets, which were filled with flashy billboards crowded together edge to edge, I tried imagining a scene where flames would spurt out suddenly from the crevices