Chapter XXXVII

by Jack London

　　"Come," says the White Logic, "and forget these Asian dreamers ofold time. Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments ofthe dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your ownwarm hills."

　　I pore over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Tokay onthe rancho called Petaluma. It is a sad long list of the names ofmen, beginning with Manuel Micheltoreno, one time Mexican"Governor, Commander-in-Chief, and Inspector of the Department ofthe Californias," who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indianland to Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo for servicesrendered his country and for moneys paid by him for ten years tohis soldiers.

　　Immediately this musty record of man's land lust assumes theformidableness of a battle--the quick struggling with the dust.There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release,transfers, judgments, foreclosures, writs of attachment, orders ofsale, tax liens, petitions for letters of administration, anddecrees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued,this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather andthat survives them all, the men who scratched its surface andpassed.

　　Who was this James King of William, so curiously named? The oldestsurviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yetonly sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteenthousand dollars on security of certain lands including thevineyard yet to be and to be called Tokay. Whence came PeterO'Connor, and whither vanished, after writing his little name of aday on the woodland that was to become a vineyard? Appears LouisCsomortanyi, a name to conjure with. He lasts through severalpages of this record of the enduring soil.

　　Comes old American stock, thirsting across the Great AmericanDesert, mule-backing across the Isthmus, wind-jamming around theHorn, to write brief and forgotten names where ten thousandgenerations of wild Indians are equally forgotten--names likeHalleck, Hastings, Swett, Tait, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood, Carlton,Temple. There are no names like those to-day in the Valley of theMoon.

　　The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legalpage to legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever thepersistent soil remains for others to scrawl themselves across.Come the names of men of whom I have vaguely heard but whom I havenever known. Kohler and Frohling--who built the great stonewinery on the vineyard called Tokay, but who built upon a hill upwhich other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohlerand Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of 1906 threw down thewinery; and I now live in its ruins.

　　La Motte--he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards,instituted commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned inits day, was defeated by the soil, and passed. And my name of aday appears. On the site of his orchards and vine-yards, of hisproud mansion, of his very fish ponds, I have scrawled myself withhalf a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees.

　　Cooper and Greenlaw--on what is called the Hill Ranch they lefttwo of their dead, "Little Lillie" and "Little David," who restto-day inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Gooperand Greenlaw in their time cleared the virgin forest from threefields of forty acres. To-day I have those three fields sown withCanada peas, and in the spring they shall be ploughed under forgreen manure.

　　Haska--a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went backup the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valleythat took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and ahouse, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the houseis undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deducedfrom the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing thebattle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that hasoverrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death.So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash myname across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page growsmusty.

　　"Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic chuckles.

　　"But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend.

　　"It was based on illusion and is a lie."

　　"A vital lie," I retort.

　　"And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?" the White Logicchallenges. "Come. Fill your glass and let us examine thesevital liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in WilliamJames a bit."

　　"A man of health," I say. "From him we may expect nophilosopher's stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonicthings to which to tie."

　　"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At theend of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment ofimmortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into termsof faith. The ripest fruit of reason the stultification ofreason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to ceasereasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well--theold, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians wherebythey reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimismconsequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.

　　"Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous somethingpossessed by you? Your body--what is it? A machine for convertingstimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered.They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousnessthese experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking atthat moment. Your I is both subject and object; it predicatesthings of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is thethought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the thingspossessed.

　　"After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states ofconsciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of selfanother self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continualbecoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts inghostland. But this, man will not accept of himself. He refusesto accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live againif he has to die to do it.

　　"He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips ofwater, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks,all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities,frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuffbuilds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and bafflethe immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a childlost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is theiryounger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be asfree as they--monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena;dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamervanishes and are no more when he is not.

　　"It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves,muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations againstthe powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and theNoseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life. Andthe metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it.They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men dielike the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Theircreeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, theirphilosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they wouldoutwit the Noseless One and the Night.

　　"Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies,wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissuesof words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings,ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is thestuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Lookat them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels--your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois andNietzsches.

　　"Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget."

　　I obey, for my brain is now well a-crawl with the maggots ofalcohol, and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quoteRichard Hovey:

　　"Abstain not! Life and Love like night and day Offer themselves to us on their own terms, Not ours. Accept their bounty while ye may, Before we be accepted by the worms,""I will cap you," cries the White Logic.

　　"No," I answer, while the maggots madden me. "I know you for whatyou are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you areyourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night.Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward'ssmug compromise "

　　"Now will I cap you!" the White Logic breaks in.

　　"But if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are free to end it when you will, Without the fear of waking after death."And I laugh my defiance; for now, and for the moment, I know theWhite Logic to be the arch-impostor of them all, whispering hiswhispers of death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, withhis own genial chemistry turning the tables on himself, with hisown maggots biting alive the old illusions, resurrecting andmaking to sound again the old voice from beyond of my youth,telling me again that still are mine the possibilities and powerswhich life and the books had taught me did not exist.

　　And the dinner gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass.Jeering at the White Logic, I go out to join my guests at table,and with assumed seriousness to discuss the current magazines andthe silly doings of the world's day, whipping every trick and ruseof controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage.And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfullydisconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeoisfetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts andthe debaucheries and follies of wisdom.

　　The clown's the thing! The clown! If one must be a philosopher,let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I amjingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labourof thinking, and, when the table is finished, start practicaljokes and set all playing at games, which we carry on with bucolicboisterousness.

　　And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go backthrough my book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself andto the White Logic which, undefeated, has never left me. And as Ifall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it:

　　"I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky-- Yea, I am Youth because I die!'"