Chapter XXXVI

by Jack London

　　Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of JohnBarleycorn's White Logic on me. On my lovely ranch in the Valleyof the Moon, brain-soaked with many months of alcohol, I amoppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritageof man. In vain do I ask myself why I should be sad. My nightsare warm. My roof does not leak. I have food galore for all thecaprices of appetite. Every creature comfort is mine. In my bodyare no aches nor pains. The good old flesh-machine is runningsmoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is overworked. I haveland, money, power, recognition from the world, a consciousnessthat I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I love,children that are of my own fond flesh. I have done, and amdoing, what a good citizen of the world should do. I have builthouses, many houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as fortrees, have I not planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from anywindow of my house, I can gaze forth upon these trees of myplanting, standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun.

　　My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. Not a hundred menin a million have been so lucky as I. Yet, with all this vastgood fortune, am I sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn iswith me. And John Barleycorn is with me because I was born inwhat future ages will call the dark ages before the ages ofrational civilisation. John Barleycorn is with me because in allthe unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn was accessible,calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every streetbetween the corners. The pseudo-civilisation into which I wasborn permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-poison. The system of life was so organised that I (and millionslike me) was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops.

　　Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadnessinto which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over mybeautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The airis wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red withautumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog arestealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I haveeverything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreamsand mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised,organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movementof the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps ofbeing, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have tenthousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom ofsense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust....

　　And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonderabout me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure Icut in this world that endured so long without me and that willagain endure without me. I remember the men who broke theirhearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs tome. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable!These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, andcleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they restedtheir labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets,at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealingacross the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too,shall some day, and soon, be gone.

　　Gone? I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of thedentists which replace the parts of me already gone. Never againwill I have the thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlingshave injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a manwhose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and forever. A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other. Mylean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory. Thejoints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as theyonce were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, Istrained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swingdizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a singlerope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. Never again can Irun with the sled-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail.

　　I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has beendying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind offlesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head.All of which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy.Fear of death makes for life. But the curse of the White Logic isthat it does not make one afraid. The world-sickness of the WhiteLogic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless Oneand to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living.

　　I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the mercilessand infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insistsupon opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapterstates the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility anddust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living, piping for a little space its thin plaint oftroubled air.

　　I return across the ranch. Twilight is on, and the huntinganimals are out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feedingon life. Here is no morality. Only in man is morality, and mancreated it--a code of action that makes toward living and that isof the lesser order of truth. Yet all this I knew before, in theweary days of my long sickness. These were the greater truthsthat I so successfully schooled myself to forget; the truths thatwere so serious that I refused to take them seriously, and playedwith gently, oh! so gently, as sleeping dogs at the back ofconsciousness which I did not care to waken. I did but stir them,and let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them.But now White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for WhiteLogic, most valiant, is unafraid of all the monsters of theearthly dream.

　　"Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me, "White Logicwhispers as I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it.You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it? Itis truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux,wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to thewheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life isghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each theother and all the others, that are, that are not, that alwaysflicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, asother appearances. You are such an appearance, composed ofcountless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can knowis mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages arethe unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances thatcrowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep youon into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculablecongeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future.Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Throughall the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the partsof you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, andgibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the processionof apparitions that will succeed you."

　　And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along throughthe evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comtecalled the world. And I remember what another pessimist ofsentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, mustdie, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest."

　　But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest.He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian.He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, Iam to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, andexistence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and livedless comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. Heis labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder istwisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws,repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserablespecimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.

　　"His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is anapparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk.He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled withsuperrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in atranscendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of theprophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise.He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubatingfantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyondthe shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was madefor him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in theimmaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have buildedof the stuff of semblance and deception.

　　"But you, who have opened the books and who share my awfulconfidence--you know him for what he is, brother to you and thedust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast thatarose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue andaccident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well tothe gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, androars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous,atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shredsof abysmal and forgotten instincts."

　　"Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastlywonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of timeand ride the eternities."

　　"Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchangeplaces with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, amarionette of the belly and the loins?"

　　"To be stupid is to be happy," I contend.

　　"Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating ina tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?"

　　Oh, the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn!

　　"One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha'sNirvana," the White Logic adds. "Oh well, here's the house.Cheer up and take a drink. We know, we illuminated, you and I,all the folly and the farce."

　　And in my book-walled den, the mausoleum of the thoughts of men, Itake my drink, and other drinks, and roust out the sleeping dogsfrom the recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls ofprejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths ofsuperstition and belief.

　　"Drink," says the White Logic. "The Greeks believed that the godsgave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness ofexistence. And remember what Heine said."

　　Well do I remember that flaming Jew's "With the last breath all isdone: joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the theatre, lime-trees,raspberry drops, the power of human relations, gossip, the barkingof dogs, champagne."

　　"Your clear white light is sickness," I tell the White Logic."You lie."

　　"By telling too strong a truth," he quips back.

　　"Alas, yes, so topsy-turvy is existence," I acknowledge sadly.

　　"Ah, well, Liu Ling was wiser than you," the White Logic girds."You remember him?"

　　I nod my head--Liu Ling, a hard drinker, one of the group ofbibulous poets who called themselves the Seven Sages of the BambooGrove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago.

　　"It was Liu Ling," prompts the White Logic, "who declared that toa drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so muchduckweed on a river. Very well. Have another Scotch, and letsemblance and deception become duck-weed on a river."

　　And while I pour and sip my Scotch, I remember another Chinesephilosopher, Chuang Tzu, who, four centuries before Christ,challenged this dreamland of the world, saying: "How then do Iknow but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?Those who dream of the banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow.Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow, wake to join the hunt.While they dream, they do not know that they dream. Some willeven interpret the very dream they are dreaming; and only whenthey awake do they know it was a dream.... Fools think they areawake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are reallyprinces or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I whosay you are dreams--I am but a dream myself.

　　"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly,fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes abutterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as abutterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man.Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do notknow whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, orwhether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."