The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Between the ages of seven and twelve my fantasy life was centered around lead mines and I spent many hours imagin­ing in the minutest detail the Platonic Idea of all lead mines. In planning its concentrating mill, I ran into difficulty: I had to choose between two types of a certain machine for separating the slimes. One I found more "beautiful" but the other was, I knew from my reading, the more efficient. My feeling at the time, I remember very clearly, was that I was confronted by a moral choice and that it was my duty to choose the second.

Like all polemical movements, existentialism is one-sided. In their laudable protest against systematic philosophers, like Hegel or Marx, who would reduce all individual existence to general processes, the existentialists have invented an equally imaginary anthropology from which all elements, like man's physical nature, or his reason, ahout which general statements can be made, are excluded.

A task for an existentialist theologian: to preach a sermon on the topic The Sleep of Christ.

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without inter­mission.

All the existentialist descriptions of choice, like Pascal's wager or Kierkegaard's leap, are interesting as dramatic literature, but are they true? When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very litde sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover that what had then seemed an unimportant brook was, in fact, a Rubicon.

For this I am very thankful since, had I been fully aware of the risk I was taking, I should never have dared take such a step.

In a reflective and anxious age, it is surely better, pedagog- ically, to minimize rather than to exaggerate the risks involved in a choice, just as one encourages a boy to swim who is afraid of the water by telling him that nothing can happen.

D

Under the stress of emotion, animals and children "make" faces, but they do not have one.

So much countenance and so little face, (henry james.) Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the fre­quency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack oЈ sensibility—the Amer­ican feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

More than any other people, perhaps, the Americans obey the scriptural injunction: "Let the dead bury their dead."

When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

It is impossible consciously to approach a mirror without com­posing or "making" a special face, and if we catch sight of our reflection unawares we rarely recognize ourselves. I cannot read my face in the mirror because I am already obvious to myself.

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

Most faces are asymmetric, i.e., one side is happy, the other sad, one self-confident, the other diffident, etc. But cutting up photographs it is possible to make two very different portraits, one from the two left sides, the other from the two rights. If these be now shown to the subject and to his friends, almost invariably the one which the subject prefers will be the one his friends dislike.

We can imagine loving what we do not love a great deal more easily than we can imagine fearing what we do not fear. I can sympathize with a man who has a passion for collecting stamps, but if he is afraid of mice there is a gulf between us. On the other hand, if he is unafraid of spiders, of which I am terrified, I admire him as superior but I do not feel that he is a stranger. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. If my friend takes up Vedanta, I can accept it, but if he prefers his steak well done, I feel it to be a treachery.