The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [69]
Soothing me thus, blankly, as if it felt nothing at all, the mask had to make me understand that sifting desires through sieves would leave nothing like what was hoped for. Pure desires are surprisingly few and simple, and it is no trouble to spot them, if we leave out the destructive ones. For example, let me enumerate some here as they occur to me.
First, food, sleep, and sex are the three great cravings. After them come general cravings, such as evacuation, thirst, escape, possession, leisure. Coming to rather special cases, we have desires for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and suicide. And, if we interpret cravings in a wider sense, we can include the desire for work and for fame.
But what I have called “expenditure of freedom” is eliminated with the first sifting. No matter how overpowering drowsiness may be, it is not a goal in itself; it should doubtless be classified as a preserving of freedom. And no matter how you consider it, basically sleep itself is simply a transition to waking up. For the same reason, it would be best to place outside the present investigation such things as evacuation, thirst, possession, escape, fame, and work. One would surely be criticized if one treated the last item, work, in the same category as evacuation. Surely considering the results, work dominates among the desires. If one did not create things, there would be no history, no world either, and perhaps indeed man himself as a thinking being would not have evolved. Moreover, through self-denial, work may become more than simple labor. Though one may make it a personal goal, unlike desire for possessions or fame, it will not make a poor impression. People nod approval and say: “He’s a hard worker.” And though they may be envious, they will hardly be censorious, as long as the work is gainful and reputable. (Actually, I was sixty percent satisfied with my work at the Institute—if I were deprived of it, I suppose I should experience a ninety-percent affection for it—but I could get along without the mask.) Even if work for the sake of work were somehow to slip through the first sieve, inevitably it would be culled in the second sifting. May I remind you that I am not talking about values, but of the immediate cravings of an escaped prisoner whose alibi is guaranteed.
Among the remaining cravings, the desire for food apparently is also eliminated in the second sifting. Let’s exclude the jumping of a restaurant bill, since that is a means rather than a goal; but it seems to me I have heard somewhere about a law that says you can’t go on stuffing yourself. Suppression of appetite is conceivable, but not suppression of desire for food. Still, if one ventured to carry this suppression of appetite to the ultimate, couldn’t it result in cannibalism? But with cannibalism, the element of killing would seem to be stronger than the desire for food. And I have already decided not to talk about murder.
For the time being suicide was a forbidden escape; I could perform it with my real face, but the mask had just made a heroic escape from being “buried alive.” If I were going to commit suicide, it would have been better to have done nothing from the first. Moreover, rather than consider the desire for leisure as an independent unit, I should like to take the view that it is something composite, sometimes a form of escape, sometimes a sort of work that has no object. Further drug addiction like alcoholism is merely a bad copy of the mask—and thus there was no need to discuss the problem again.
So my siftings finally left, most suitably for my condition, these sacrificial compulsions.
BY THE WAY, I wonder what you think of this reasoning. Yes, of course I mean reasoning. While that night I intended to expend freedom purely by succeeding in reasoning that there was nothing for me but a sexual crime, actually I committed no act that might possibly be construed