The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [164]
"We've become destiny, eh?" Hearn said.
"Precisely. The currents that have been released are not going to subside. You shy away from it, but it's equivalent to turning your back on the world. I tell you I've made a study of this. For the past century the entire historical process has been working toward greater and greater consolidation of power. Physical power for this century, an extension of our universe, and a political power, a political organization to make it possible. Your men of power in America, I can tell you, are becoming conscious of their real aims for the first time in our history. Watch. After the war our foreign policy is going to be far more naked, far less hypocritical than it has ever been. We're no longer going to cover our eyes with our left hand while our right is extending an imperialist paw."
Hearn shrugged. "You think it's going to come about as easily as that? Without resistance?"
"With much less resistance than you think. In college the one axiom you seem to have carried away is that everyone is sick, everyone is corrupt. And it's reasonably true. Only the innocent are healthy, and the innocent man is a vanishing breed. I tell you nearly all of humanity is dead, merely waiting to be disinterred."
"And the special few?"
"Just what do you think man's deepest urge is?"
Hearn grinned, his eyes probing Cummings. "A good piece of ass probably."
The answer grated, made Cummings's flesh tingle. He had been absorbed in the argument, temporarily indifferent to Hearn, concerned only with unfolding his thesis, and the obscenity stirred little swirls of apprehension in him. His anger returned again.
For the moment, however, he ignored Hearn. "I doubt it." Hearn shrugged once more, his silence unpleasantly eloquent. There was something unapproachable and unattainable about Hearn which had always piqued him, always irritated him subtly. The empty pit where there should be a man. And at the moment he desired, with an urgency that clamped his jaws together, to arouse some emotion in Hearn. Women would have wanted to excite some love from him, but for himself -- to see Hearn afraid, filled with shame if only for an instant.
Cummings went on talking, his voice quiet and expressionless. "The average man always sees himself in relation to other men as either inferior or superior. Women play no part in it. They're an index, a yardstick among other gauges, by which to measure superiority."
"Did you arrive at that all by yourself, sir? It's an impressive analysis."
Hearn's sarcasm riled him again. "I'm quite aware, Robert, that you've worked out the ABC's of something like that, but you don't carry it any further. You stop there, go back to your starting point, and take off again. The truth of it is that from man's very inception there has been one great vision, blurred first by the exigencies and cruelties of nature, and then, as nature began to be conquered, by the second great cloak -- economic fear and economic striving. That particular vision has been muddied and diverted, but we're coming to a time when our techniques will enable us to achieve it." He exhaled his smoke slowly. "There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God."
"Man's deepest urge is omnipotence?"
"Yes. It's not religion, that's obvious, it's not love, it's not spirituality, those are all sops along the way, benefits we devise for ourselves when the limitations of our existence turn us away from the other dream. To achieve God. When we come kicking into the world, we are God, the universe is the limit of our senses. And when we get older, when we discover that the universe is not us, it's the deepest trauma of our existence."