Chapter II

by Jack London

　　And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in allsympathy; and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin byunderstanding me and whom and what I write about. In the firstplace, I am a seasoned drinker. I have no constitutionalpredisposition for alcohol. I am not stupid. I am not a swine.I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I have used my judgmentin drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor do I stagger.In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the normal,average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I amwriting of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. Ihave no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportantexcessivist, the dipsomaniac.

　　There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is theman whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bittennumbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread,tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, inthe extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He isthe type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.

　　The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when mostpleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, neverstaggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he isdoing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He maybubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may seeintellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical andthat take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this conditionthat he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions andgravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about theneck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlestpower. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is aterrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legsunswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds forhimself but one freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day ofhis death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (ofwhich more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws ofthings--the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour.His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into thegrave.

　　All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches afterimmortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear ofdeath, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination.They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to diewhen the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves intobelieving they will outwit the game and win to a future, leavingthe other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilatingheats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his whitelogic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one eventhappeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, noteven that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But heknows, he knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. Heis compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered atby doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung intothe scrap-heap at the end.

　　Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is thepenalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with JohnBarleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler,easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. Hesleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim andinarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sendsthe pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looksupon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of apessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions.He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, andlife is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude ofa god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--inthe clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds andshams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is theirfrailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms,like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets ofchance. So is he. He realises that. But there is onedifference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: hemay anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good fora man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide,quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through theyears, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his everescapes making the just, due payment.