The Rebel Angels

"Then it blasts them. They will be no worse off than millions of others who have been blasted by far less elegant agencies than my philosophical teaching. Of course I tell them what I have just told you: when human reason refuses to admit vassalage to anything other than itself, life becomes tragedy. God is the factor that banishes that tragedy. But very often my students have turned to philosophy to get away from God – some peanut God, usually of their parents' devising. Like so many would-be intellectuals, they have trivial minds and adore tragedy and complexity."

That was one Parlabane. But there was at least one other known to me, quite apart from the Parlabane who stodged pasta and guzzled coarse wine and talked dirtily in The Rude Plenty, and the Parlabane who borrowed money almost every week. This Parlabane was by no means the sceptical philosopher.

"You wouldn't expect me to live always on such dizzy intellectual heights, would you, Molly? I should certainly be the wildest sort of fake if I did, and many philosophers have come to grief that way. For example that high-minded romantic Nietzsche. He never let himself off the chain. Of course he believed implicitly in his nonsense, whereas I, as a sceptic, am committed to non-belief in everything, including my most cherished philosophical ideas. Nietzsche once said that there could be no gods, because he could not endure it if there were gods and he were not one of them himself. Which is as good as saying that nothing can be true if it does not put Friedrich Nietzsche at the top of the tree. I am not like that; I recognize that a tree has a bottom as well as a top, a root as well as a crown. That is to say, I assume it to be so for practical purposes, because I have never seen or heard of a tree that did not fit that description.

"I have thought a good deal about trees; I like them. They speak eloquently of the balanced dubiety which I told you was the sceptical attitude. No splendid crown without the strong root that works in the dark, drawing its nourishment among the rocks, the soil, hidden waters, and all the little, burrowing things. A man is like that; his splendours and his fruits are to be seen, to win him love and admiration. But what about the root?

"Have you ever seen a bulldozer clearing land? It advances upon a great tree and shoves and pushes inexorably until the tree is down and thrust out of the way, and all of that effort is accompanied by a screaming and wrenching sound from the tree as the great roots are torn from the ground. It is a particularly distressing kind of death. And when the tree is upturned, the root proves to be as big as the crown.

"What is the root of man? All sorts of things that nourish his visible part, but the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was, of which I spoke to you when I was amusing you with the story of my life. That is the root which goes deepest because it is reaching downward towards the ancestors.

"The ancestors – how grand it sounds! But the root does not go back to those old stuffed shirts with white wigs whose portraits people display so proudly, but to our unseen depths – which means the messy stuff of life from which the real creation and achievement takes its nourishment. The root is far more like a large placenta than it is like those family trees that are all branches."

"You talk like Ozias Froats."

"The Turd-Skinner? Do you know him? I wish you'd introduce me."

"I certainly won't if you talk of him as the Turd-Skinner. I think he's a Paracelsian magus; he has a bigger view of things than any of us – except Professor Hollier, perhaps. Truth lies in the hidden and unacknowledged."

"Yes: shit. But what does he think is hidden in it?"

"He won't say, and I don't expect I'd understand his terms if he did say. But I think it's some sort of individual stamp, and maybe it changes significantly with states of health and mental health; a new measure of – I don't think I know what, but something like personality or individuality. I shouldn't make guesses."

"I know; it's not your field."

"But if he's right, it's everybody's field, because everybody will be the greater for what Ozias Froats has discovered."

"Well, I wish him luck. But as a sceptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a sceptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding."