In Defense of Women

by H. L. Mencken

Contents

Introduction

I The Feminine Mind

II The War between The Sexes

III Marriage

IV Woman Suffrage

V The New Age

Introduction

As a professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, and so apposite and sound that they will eventually conquer that instinctive opposition, and force themselves into the traditional wisdom of the race. I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday, with new labels stuck rakishly upon them. This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day’s work. The most they can ever accomplish in the way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield and have done. Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly beset, first by a public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel, does not act, it reacts—and what is the instrument of reflection and speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the contemporary metaphysician’s loftiest flight, when he is most gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict that what has been revealed from Sinai shall suffice for him, and for his resistance to the natural process which seeks to reduce him to the respectable level of a patriot and taxpayer.

I was, of course, privy to this difficulty when I planned the present work, and entered upon it with no expectation that I should be able to embellish it with, almost, more than a very small number of hitherto unutilized notions. Moreover, I faced the additional handicap of having an audience of extraordinary antipathy to ideas before me, for I wrote it in war-time, with all foreign markets cut off, and so my only possible customers were Americans. Of their unprecedented dislike for novelty in the domain of the intellect I have often discoursed in the past, and so there is no need to go into the matter again. All I need do here is to recall the fact that, in the United States, alone among the great nations of history, there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think in everything—not only in theology, or politics, or economics, but in the most trivial matters of everyday life. Thus, in the average American city the citizen who, in the face of an organized public clamour(usually managed by interested parties) for the erection of an equestrian statue of Susan B. Anthony, the apostle of woman suffrage, in front of the chief railway station, or the purchase of a dozen leopards for the municipal zoo, or the dispatch of an invitation to the Structural Iron Workers’ Union to hold its next annual convention in the town Symphony Hall—the citizen who, for any logical reason, opposes such a proposal—on the ground, say, that Miss Anthony never mounted a horse in her life, or that a dozen leopards would be less useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—this citizen is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offence of “imagining the King’s death”has been formally revived by the American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and speaking the language of countries recently at war with the Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are. For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise, not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their ingenuity and their patriotic passion.

Familiar with the risks flowing out of it—and having just had to change the plates of my “Book of Prefaces,” a book of purely literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in order to get it through the mails, I determined to make this brochure upon the woman question extremely pianissimo in tone, and to avoid burdening it with any ideas of an unfamiliar, and hence illegal nature. So deciding, I presently added a bravura touch: the unquenchable vanity of the intellectual snob asserting itself over all prudence. That is to say, I laid down the rule that no idea should go into the book that was not already so obvious that it had been embodied in the proverbial philosophy, or folk-wisdom, of some civilized nation, including the Chinese. To this rule I remained faithful throughout. In its original form, as published in 1918, the book was actuary just such a pastiche of proverbs, many of them English, and hence familiar even to Congressmen, newspaper editors and other such illiterates. It was not always easy to hold to this program; over and over again I was tempted to insert notions that seemed to have escaped the peasants of Europe and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the national decencies. In the South, where the suspicion of ideas goes to extraordinary lengths, even for the United States, some of the newspapers actually denounced the book as German propaganda, designed to break down American morale, and called upon the Department of Justice to proceed against me for the crime known to American law as “criminal anarchy,” i.e., “imagining the King’s death.” Why the Comstocks did not forbid it the mails as lewd and lascivious I have never been able to determine. Certainly, they received many complaints about it. I myself, in fact, caused a number of these complaints to be lodged, in the hope that the resultant buffooneries would give me entertainment in those dull days of war, with all intellectual activities adjourned, and maybe promote the sale of the book. But the Comstocks were pursuing larger fish, and so left me to the righteous indignation of right-thinking reviewers, especially the suffragists. Their concern, after all, is not with books that are denounced; what they concentrate their moral passion on is the book that is praised.

The present edition is addressed to a wider audience, in more civilized countries, and so I have felt free to introduce a number of propositions, not to be found in popular proverbs, that had to be omitted from the original edition. But even so, the book by no means pretends to preach revolutionary doctrines, or even doctrines of any novelty. All I design by it is to set down in more or less plain form certain ideas that practically every civilized man and woman holds in petto, but that have been concealed hitherto by the vast mass of sentimentalities swathing the whole woman question. It is a question of capital importance to all human beings, and it deserves to be discussed honestly and frankly, but there is so much of social reticence, of religious superstition and of mere emotion intermingled with it that most of the enormous literature it has thrown off is hollow and useless. I point for example, to the literature of the subsidiary question of woman suffrage. It fills whole libraries, but nine tenths of it is merely rubbish, for it starts off from assumptions that are obviously untrue and it reaches conclusions that are at war with both logic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it counsels yielding to celibacy, which is exactly as sensible as advising a dog to forget its fleas. Here, as in other fields, I do not presume to offer a remedy of my own. In truth, I am very suspicious of all remedies for the major ills of life, and believe that most of them are incurable. But I at least venture todiscuss the matter realistically, and if what I have to say is not sagacious, it is at all events not evasive. This, I hope, is something. Maybe some later investigator will bring a better illumination to the subject.

It is the custom of The Free-Lance Series to print a paragraph or two about the author in each volume. I was born in Baltimore, September 12, 1880, and come of a learned family, though my immediate forebears were business men. The tradition of this ancient learning has been upon me since my earliest days, and I narrowly escaped becoming a doctor of philosophy. My father’s death, in 1899, somehow dropped me into journalism, where I had a successful career, as such careers go. At the age of 25 1 was the chief editor of a daily newspaper in Baltimore. During the same year I published my first book of criticism. Thereafter, for ten or twelve years, I moved steadily from practical journalism, with its dabbles in politics, economics and soon, toward purely aesthetic concerns, chiefly literature and music, but of late I have felt a strong pull in the other direction, and what interests me chiefly today is what may be called public psychology, ie., the nature of the ideas that the larger masses of men hold, and the processes whereby they reach them. If I do any serious writing hereafter, it will be in that field. In the United States I am commonly held suspect as a foreigner, and during the war I was variously denounced. Abroad, especially in England, I am sometimes put to the torture for my intolerable Americanism. The two views are less far apart than they seem to be. The fact is that I am superficially so American, in ways of speech and thought, that the foreigner is deceived, whereas the native, more familiar with the true signs, sees that under the surface there is incurable antagonism to most of the ideas that Americans hold to be sound. Thus If all between two stools—but it is more comfortable there on the floor than sitting up tightly. I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I’d probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it.

H. L. Mencken

The Feminine Mind

The Maternal Instinct

A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.

The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is obviously of masculine manufacture. It is both insincere and untrue: insincere because it merely masks the egotistic doctrine that he is potentially a hero to everyone else, and untrue because a valet, being a fourth-rate man himself, is likely to be the last person in the world to penetrate his master’s charlatanry. Who ever heard of valet who didn’t envy his master wholeheartedly? who wouldn’t willingly change places with his master? who didn’t secretly wish that he was his master? A man’s wife labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can’t recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.

2.

Women’s Intelligence

That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one of the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the demonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new, gives it the humourless title of “ The Intelligence of Women. “ The intelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth—to that extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. “Human creatures,” says George, borrowing from Weininger, “are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.” Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it;

Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.

It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour—that complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

3.

The Masculine Bag of Tricks

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chief business “geniuses” of that paradise of traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man’s world they were successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges.

There is, indeed, fair ground for arguing that, if men of that kidney were genuinely intelligent, they would never succeed at their gross an driveling concerns—that their very capacity to master and retain such balderdash as constitutes their stock in trade is proof of their inferior mentality. The notion is certainly supported by the familiar incompetency of first rate men for what are called practical concerns. One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average men’s highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae.

This lack of skill at manual and mental tricks of a trivial character—which must inevitably appear to a barber or a dentist as stupidity, and to a successful haberdasher as downright imbecility—is a character that men of the first class share with women of the first, second and even third classes. There is at the bottom of it, in truth, something unmistakably feminine; its appearance in a man is almost invariably accompanied by the other touch of femaleness that I have described. Nothing, indeed, could be plainer than the fact that women, as a class, are sadly deficient in the small expertness of men as a class. One seldom, if ever, hears of them succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.

4.

Why Women Fail

The cause thereof, as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in the same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that elaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is the pride and boast of most men. It is a commonplace of observation, indeed, that a housewife who actually knows how to cook, or who can make her own clothes with enough skill to conceal the fact from the most casual glance, or who is competent to instruct her children in the elements of morals, learning and hygiene—it is a platitude that such a woman is very rare indeed, and that when she is encountered she is not usually esteemed for her general intelligence. This is particularly true in the United States, where the position of women is higher than in any other civilized or semi-civilized country, and the old assumption of their intellectual inferiority has been most successfully challenged. The American dinner-table, in truth, becomes a monument to the defective technic of the American housewife. The guest who respects his oesophagus, invited to feed upon its discordant and ill-prepared victuals, evades the experience as long and as often as he can, and resigns himself toit as he might resign himself to being shaved by a paralytic. Nowhere else in the world have women more leisure and freedom to improve their minds, and nowhere else do they show a higher level of intelligence, or take part more effectively in affairs of the first importance. But nowhere else is there worse cooking in the home, or a more inept handling of the whole domestic economy, or a larger dependence upon the aid of external substitutes, by men provided, for the skill that wanting where it theoretically exists. It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready-made. And nowhere else is there more striking tendency to throw the whole business of training the minds of children upon professional teachers, and the whole business of instructing them in morals and religion upon so-called Sunday-schools, and the whole business of developing and caring for their bodies upon playground experts, sex hygienists and other such professionals, most of them mountebanks.

In brief, women rebel—often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting all the while—against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the present organization of society compels them to practise for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed and took pride in those tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, they would be on all fours with such men as are headwaiters, ladies’ tailors, schoolmasters or carpet-beaters, and proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily or permanently, of the inclination to marriage (of which much more anon), and she enters into competition with men in the general business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers additional evidence of her mental peculiarity. In whatever calls for no more than an invariable technic and a feeble chicanery she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel and disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and dominating character; and whenever she comes into competition with men in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple nimbleness of mind is unaided by the masterstrokes of genius, she holds her own invariably. The best and most intellectual—i.e., most original and enterprising play-actors are not men, but women, and so are the best teachers and blackmailers, and a fair share of the best writers, and public functionaries, and executants of music. In the demimonde one will find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

5.

The Thing Called Intuition

Men, as every one knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, as we shall see a bit later on, there is a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague(and, in essence, infra-human) instinct.

The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an examination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his aid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems that are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental, and hence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at long and irregular intervals, and go offer a test, not of his mere capacity for being drilled, but of his capacity for genuine ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit to some paltry customer, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or about combating unfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying off their daughter. Such things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of well-being; they call for the best thought that the, man confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even the clamors of vanity. It is in such situations that the superior mental grasp of women is of obvious utility, and has to be admitted. It is here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their singular talent for separating the appearance from the substance, and so exercise what is called their intuition.

Intuition? With all respect, bosh! Then it was intuition that led Darwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was intuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of “Die Walkure.” Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere externals. They are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant, jellylike shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself—men recognized to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general—men of special talent for the logical—sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the average women of forty-eight.

by Julia Layton

March 7, 2007
If one can make broad generalizations about humanity based on a single life’s view — and of course one can’t — there appear to be two kinds of people in the world: Those who damn the world for interfering with their nine hours a night, and those who damn the body for being unsatisfied with four. (And then there are those who claim they function perfectly well on two, but according to sleep experts, they’re just wrong.) Those who damn the body are in luck: Science is working hard to phase out the need for natural sleep.

Human beings have always found ways to ward off the effects of sleep deprivation. When you’re getting about half of the sleep your body needs on a regular basis (and most of us need seven to eight hours a night), you need to find ways to function — to wake yourself up, clear your mind, stop your head from falling into your salad during a business lunch. Caffeine and amphetamines (i.e. speed) are two of the most popular methods, but they’re far from ideal. Both will keep you awake, but the side effects can be awful. Caffeine can make you jittery and give you diarrhea, and you can end up with a nasty headache when it leaves your system. Amphetamines can effect your behavior (make you “high”), and you crash hard when they wear off, leaving you depressed or irritable. And both caffeine and amphetamines are addictive.

The newest wake-up pill has all of the benefits of caffeine and amphetamines with none of the down sides. It has elicited so few complaints of side effects from users — they claim it has no side effects at all except for the occasional slight headache — it’s the closest thing to a miracle the pharmaceutical world has seen since Viagra, if Viagra didn’t sometimes cause blindness, heart attacks and five-hour erections. It’s called modafinil, and it’s FDA-approved to treat narcolepsy. But the drug has gained a dedicated off-label following as a “lifestyle drug.” Doctors all over the country are reporting record numbers of sudden narcoleptics showing up in their waiting rooms. (As it turns out, you can get diagnosed as a narcoleptic online.)

Modafinil is in a class of drugs called eugeroics. It’s a different kind of stimulant. No one knows exactly how modafinil works, but we do that modafinil works on different processes than stimulants like caffeine and amphetamine, and we know how caffeine and amphetamines work. Caffeine’s main action is to block the receptors in the brain that bind to the neurotransmitter adenosine. Adenosine slows down cell activity and triggers drowsiness when it binds to those receptors. With adenosine receptors blocked by caffeine, the brain can’t slow down, and you stay awake and alert. Caffeine also blocks the re-uptake of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that causes happy feelings. It’s the dopamine response that can be addictive. Amphetamines target dopamine receptors in a big way. When you take an amphetamine, the brain gets flooded with dopamine that has nowhere to go because its receptors are turned off — that’s its primary action. All of that dopamine makes you feel excited, energetic and just plain good.

It also makes you feel incredibly depressed when the dose wears off and the dopamine finally goes away.

Modafinil doesn’t have that problem, and the difference seems to be in its ability to target the brain’s sleep response specifically, instead of just flooding the brain with dopamine and adenosine willy-nilly. It does limit dopamine re-uptake to some extent, but it doesn’t produce the highs and lows that other stimulants do. The reason could be that it simply produces a lighter dopamine response — there’s less of it flooding the brain. It could also be that modafinil prevents the re-uptake of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline by neurons that specifically trigger sleep, and that this is a stronger effect than the dopamine response. The dopamine could just be a low-grade, ancillary effect.

Aside from the dopamine and noradrenaline, experts believe that modafinil targets the neurotransmitter GABA — the brain’s primary sleep regulator. It seems to slow GABA’s release, interfering with the brain’s awareness of when it’s time to get some sleep. It probably interferes with the behavior of histamine as well, a chemical that causes drowsiness. And according to some scientists, the big modafinil punch comes in its effect on glutamate, the brain’s energy chemical. If modafinil does indeed stimulate the action of glutamate, it would not only cause an overall excited neural response, but it would also effectively block GABA sleepiness signals by creating so much noise.

One of the most mysterious things about modafinil, even in view of its multi-pronged, targeted approach to sleep avoidance, is that it appears to trigger no “sleep debt.” People who stay awake for a day or two on modafinil report no need to catch up on sleep when the dose wears off. They can just sleep the usual seven or eight hours and get back in the game. People who take amphetamines typically need to sleep for half a day when the high wears off.

Sleep-avoidance is a huge area of study right now, partly because the market is substantial. Cephalon, the company behind modafinil, sold almost $600 million worth of the stuff in 2005 (all to narcoleptics, of course). With that much money at stake, modafinil isn’t the only player in the wake-up game. Researchers are developing and testing all sorts of new ways to keep people alert on limited sleep and even eliminate the need for natural sleep altogether. The idea is to bend sleep to the needs of our lifestyle instead of the other way around.

Cephalon is currently in the final stages of getting a newer version of modafinil to market. This pill offers more hours of wakefulness per dose. The pharmaceutical company Cortex is working with DARPA on a drug code-named CX717, which keeps people awake and alert by triggering increased glutamate activity. Other drugs in the works specifically target histamine. But that’s only the beginning. Some researchers are trying to find a way to mimic the rejuvenating effects of eight hours of sleep in just three or four hours. The end result would probably be a pill that will put you to sleep for specific amount of time and then wake you up. You’d be able to pop a three-hour sleep pill or a five-hour sleep pill, depending on what your schedule allows, and wake up feeling like you’d gotten eight hours of the best sleep of your life. In other labs, there are sleep-avoidance machines that deliver a small electric current to a targeted area of the brain to keep it awake and functioning without sleep. The end result of this research could be a piece of head-gear that provides a wake-up jolt at the push of a button.

But this is all child’s play compared to the search for the sleep gene.

According to sleep experts, about one in 1,000 people actually is a “short sleeper” — he or she can function at an optimum level on a few hours a night. And this ability seems to be genetically linked. So scientists are trying to find the genes that regulate the need for sleep, specifically looking for a “short-sleeper gene” that they can use as a guide to genetically tweak the rest of us into short sleepers. There’s also sleep-gene research that focuses on a genetic mutation found in a particular type of fruit fly. This fruit fly needs about one-third the amount of sleep that every other type of fruit fly needs. The mutation causes interruptions in the transportation of potassium through cell membranes. Scientists note that in humans suffering from Morvan’s syndrome, defects in the brain’s potassium system leads to an inability to sleep. So it appears that messing with the brain’s potassium channels by way of a pharmaceutical or gene therapy could be a very effective way of promoting wakefulness.

Of course, wakefulness has its downsides. Before we can be happily, eternally awake, science will have to address the fact that prolonged sleep deprivation causes sickness, delirium and death.

Sleep is not something human beings can just give up without consequences. Much of the sleep-elimination research is funded by the military, which has good reason to find a way to neutralize the effects of sleep deprivation: battle conditions. Soldiers, especially those in special ops units like the SEALs or the Green Berets, may have to go three or four days with almost no sleep and still function as if their lives depended on it, which they pretty much do. The military has tested modafinil extensively on pilots, basically keeping them awake for about two days on repeated doses modafinil and intermittently sending them up to fly a fighter jet. The results have been pretty good, although the researchers doubt modafinil can ward off drowsiness, disorientation, slowed judgement and poor reflexes once you pass the 48-hour mark. For the time being, people can only stay awake so long without falling apart, even on the current miracle drug.

Most of us don’t have jobs that require us to save the world without a good night’s rest, but the culture of productivity has too much momentum to stop its march toward a 48-hour day. As workplaces become increasingly international, work weeks regularly pass the 80-hour mark and more and more drive-thrus stay open for the 3 a.m. crowd, we can all look forward to a future that frees us from our biological urge to rest on a 24-hour cycle. Even sleep advocates see the shift as inevitable. In 10 or 20 years, sleep will be dispensable, artificial and controllable. Much in the way hormone-based birth control pills can now make a woman’s period last exactly three days, occur on a quarterly basis or disappear altogether until she wants it back, science is separating sleep from the inconvenience of nature.

For more information on sleep, the lack thereof and related topics, check out the following links:

• How the Brain Works
• How Caffeine Works
• How Sleep Works
• Mayo Clinic: Insomnia
• NewScientist.com: Get ready for 24-hour living – Feb. 18, 2006
• Popular Science: The Future of Work: You Snooze, You Lose – Mar. 2007

Sources

11岁, ÷坐在出租车里离去, 转头看后窗, 向我们招手说再见. 我满眼含泪, 想追那辆出租车. 情窦初开.

12岁, 满心欢喜地推自行车出校门, 抬头看看头顶的杨树,阳光透过树叶照在我脸上, 那树来自他在的地方,那地方冰天雪地. 他那里应该还是早上, 呵, 赖在被窝里的÷.

13岁, 他又回来了, 可是我长胖了, 脸上都是痘痘. 我不想见他, 可是还是忍不住慢慢走进他, “你回头啊, 你快回头啊”. 他真的回了, 眼中为什么是厌烦的神色呢? 一定是那该死的痘痘.

14岁, “我恨你. 我要把所有关于你的东西和回忆都烧掉.”

17岁, I got a hunch. It’s coming back to me. 天天朝着他在的地方的相对方向想”你什么时候才回来呢”

18岁, 我走在大街上, 熙熙攘攘地. 可是里面却没有你. 你难道永远都不会来了吗? 永远见不到最好.

几天后他回来了. 他直视我眼睛, 说”妹妹”. 我失措, 他看出什么了吗. 是真心为了打断我的痴心妄想吗?

19岁, msn上, 两人都沉默着.

21岁, 他又回来. 我们坐并排, 他有时转头看我, 我硬是狠着心, 直视前方, 不看他.

上周, 听歌突然触动心事, 往事都浮起来. 哭了一整夜. 今天居然听一首叫love you的歌又伤心了.

不, 我不要暗恋. 我不要忧伤. 我这么骄傲的人. 可是我的眼泪和感情, 为什么都这般cheap呢. 为什么我那么容易被触动, 那么容易流眼泪. 不, 我才不是感情动物, 我才不是软弱的女人. 就当他死了好了.

可是我还是想再见他一面. 你在做什么呢?

Learn Linux cmd and shell scripts

The True Voices

如果你想学英语，或者爱看近似舞台表演的独白，或者愿意了解当今英国社会，或者愿意了解人与人的关系，我都会推荐这套节目。形容这套节目用得最多的词是： powerful。

A Brief Madness


Japanese Way to fold a t-shirt

THE COMMON READER

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. “. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

JANE AUSTEN

It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way we should have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to be of interest.

Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical and affected,” says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs. Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers “. Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and] says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that, until Pride and Prejudice showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or firescreen. . . . The case is very different now”, the good lady goes on; “she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . . A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.

To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of an astonishing and unchildish story, Love and Freindship,⁸ which, incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. These are jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.

⁸ Love and Freindship, Chatto and Windus.

Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense,—Love and Freindship is all that; but what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent features of every ballroom. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end THERE; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of the first characters in the world”, she called her, “a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontë‘s wrote, not very much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and, incidentally, the authoress of a novel called Pride and Prejudice, which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another story, The Watsons, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it, left it unfinished. The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces. Here her difficulties are more apparent, and the method she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting. Suddenly she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to happen. The Edwardses are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrave retreats to a remote corner with a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a link which carries the story this way and that.

But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise, and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular chapters of The Watsons prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part of the ladies to get tired; a little principle supported it, a little consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular, she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous lady’s ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collinses, her Sir Walter Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennets. She encircles them with the lash of a whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug and trying to keep him from the flower-beds” eternally. A divine justice is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight.

Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny a little late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that, consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.

That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

What more natural, then, with this insight into their profundity, than that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No “suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country-house staircase as she saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example, she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She could not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods”, the night is at once as “solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that it was.

The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.

And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.

Title:      Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Author:     George Orwell

Chapter 1

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind efface you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:

‘Italiano?’

I answered in my bad Spanish: ‘No, Ingles. Y tu?’

‘Italiano.’

As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard.  Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory. With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war—the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance.  Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air—raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English—speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

All this time I was at the Lenin Barracks, ostensibly in training for the front. When I joined the militia I had been told that I should be sent to the front the next day, but in fact I had to wait while a fresh centuria was got ready. The workers’ militias, hurriedly raised by the trade unions at the beginning of the war, had not yet been organized on an ordinary army basis. The units of command were the ‘section’, of about thirty men, the centuria, of about a hundred men, and the ‘column’, which in practice meant any large number of men. The Lenin Barracks was a block of splendid stone buildings with a riding—school and enormous cobbled courtyards; it had been a cavalry barracks and had been captured during the July fighting. My centuria slept in one of the stables, under the stone mangers where the names of the cavalry chargers were still inscribed. All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the whole place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats. I was at the barracks about a week. Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs—I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding—school. There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen’s wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution. In every comer you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food. There was frightful wastage of food, especially bread. From my barrack-room alone a basketful of bread was thrown away at every meal—a disgraceful thing when the civilian population was short of it. We ate at long trestle-tables out of permanently greasy tin pannikins, and drank out of a dreadful thing called a porron. A porron is a sort of glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as soon as I saw a porron in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.

By degrees they were issuing the recruits with uniforms, and because this was Spain everything was issued piecemeal, so that it was never quite certain who had received what, and various of the things we most needed, such as belts and cartridge-boxes, were not issued till the last moment, when the train was actually waiting to take us to the front. I have spoken of the militia ‘uniform’, which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps a ‘multiform’ would be the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in any two cases.  Practically everyone in the army wore corduroy knee-breeches, but there the uniformity ended. Some wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others leather leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable colour. The kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It was usual to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition nearly every man. wore a red or red and black handkerchief round his throat. A militia column at that time was an extraordinary-looking rabble. But the clothes had to be issued as this or that factory rushed them out, and they were not bad clothes considering the circumstances.  The shirts and socks were wretched cotton things, however, quite useless against cold. I hate to think of what the militiamen must have gone through in the earlier months before anything was organized. I remember coming upon a newspaper of only about two months earlier in which one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, after a visit to the front, said that he would try to see to it that ‘every militiaman had a blanket’. A phrase to make you shudder if you have ever slept in a trench.

On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ‘instruction’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos.  The recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardour but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer.  The lieutenant who instructed us was a stout, fresh-faced, pleasant young man who had previously been a Regular Army officer, and still looked like one, with his smart carriage and spick-and-span uniform.  Curiously enough he was a sincere and ardent Socialist. Even more than the men themselves he insisted upon complete social equality between all ranks. I remember his pained surprise when an ignorant recruit addressed him as ‘Senor’. ‘What! Senor? Who is that calling me Senor?  Are we not all comrades?’ I doubt whether it made his job any easier.  Meanwhile the raw recruits were getting no military training that could be of the slightest use to them. I had been told that foreigners were not obliged to attend ‘instruction’ (the Spaniards, I noticed, had a pathetic belief that all foreigners knew more of military matters than themselves), but naturally I turned out with the others. I was very anxious to learn how to use a machine-gun; it was a weapon I had never had a chance to handle. To my dismay I found that we were taught nothing about the use of weapons. The so-called instruction was simply parade-ground drill of the most antiquated, stupid kind; right turn, left turn, about turn, marching at attention in column of threes and all the rest of that useless nonsense which I had learned when I was fifteen years old. It was an extraordinary form for the training of a guerilla army to take. Obviously if you have only a few days in which to train a soldier, you must teach him the things he will most need; how to take cover, how to advance across open ground, how to mount guards and build a parapet—above all, how to use his weapons. Yet this mob of eager children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb. At the time I did not grasp that this was because there were no weapons to be had. In the P.O.U.M. militia the shortage of rifles was so desperate that fresh troops reaching the front always had to take their rifles from the troops they relieved in the line. In the whole of the Lenin Barracks there were, I believe, no rifles except those used by the sentries.

After a few days, though still a complete rabble by any ordinary standard, we were considered fit to be seen in public, and in the mornings we were marched out to the public gardens on the hill beyond the Plaza de Espana. This was the common drill-ground of all the party militias, besides the Carabineros and the first contingents of the newly formed Popular Army. Up in the public gardens it was a strange and heartening sight. Down every path and alley-way, amid the formal flower-beds, squads and companies of men marched stiffly to and fro, throwing out their chests and trying desperately to look like soldiers.  All of them were unarmed and none completely in uniform, though on most of them the militia uniform was breaking out in patches here and there.  The procedure was always very much the same. For three hours we strutted to and fro (the Spanish marching step is very short and rapid), then we halted, broke the ranks, and flocked thirstily to a little grocer’s shop which was half-way down the hill and was doing a roaring trade in cheap wine. Everyone was very friendly to me. As an Englishman I was something of a curiosity, and the Carabinero officers made much of me and stood me drinks. Meanwhile, whenever I could get our lieutenant into a corner, I was clamouring to be instructed in the use of a machine-gun. I used to drag my Hugo’s dictionary out of my pocket and start on him in my villainous Spanish:

‘To se manejar fusil. Mo se manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender ametralladora. Quando vamos apprender ametralladora?’

The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be machine-gun instruction manana. Needless to say manana never came.  Several days passed and the recruits learned to march in step and spring to attention almost smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the bullet came out of, that was all they knew. One day an armed Carabinero strolled up to us when we were halting and allowed us to examine his rifle. It turned out that in the whole of my section no one except myself even knew how to load the rifle, much less how to take aim.

All this time I was having the usual struggles with the Spanish language. Apart from myself there was only one Englishman at the barracks, and nobody even among the officers spoke a word of French.  Things were not made easier for me by the fact that when my companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in Catalan. The only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small dictionary which I whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain I Within a day or two there was a score of militiamen who called me by my Christian name, showed me the ropes, and overwhelmed me with hospitality. I am not writing a book of propaganda and I do not want to idealize the P.O.U.M. militia. The whole militia—system had serious faults, and the men themselves were a mixed lot, for by this time voluntary recruitment was falling off and many of the best men were already at the front or dead. There was always among us a certain percentage who were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were being brought up for enlistment by their parents, quite openly for the sake of the ten pesetas a day which was the militiaman’s wage; also for the sake of the bread which the militia received in plenty and could smuggle home to their parents. But I defy anyone to be thrown as I was among the Spanish working class—I ought perhaps to say the Catalan working class, for apart from a few Aragonese and Andalusians I mixed only with Catalans—and not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing.  If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances. Some of the journalists and other foreigners who travelled in Spain during the war have declared that in secret the Spaniards were bitterly jealous of foreign aid. All I can say is that I never observed anything of the kind. I remember that a few days before I left the barracks a group of men returned on leave from the front.  They were talking excitedly about their experiences and were full of enthusiasm for some French troops who had been next to them at Huesca.  The French were very brave, they said; adding enthusiastically: ‘Mas valientes que nosotros’—‘Braver than we are!’ Of course I demurred, whereupon they explained that the French knew more of the art of war –were more expert with bombs, machine-guns, and so forth. Yet the remark was significant. An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like that.

Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first few weeks in learning to love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain of their characteristics. In the front line my own exasperation sometimes reached the pitch of fury. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is manana—‘tomorrow’ (literally, ‘the morning’). Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until manana. This is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it. In Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As a general rule things happen too late, but just occasionally—just so that you shan’t even be able to depend on their happening late—they happen too early. A train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half past seven. Such things can be a little trying. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.

After endless rumours, mananas, and delays we were suddenly ordered to the front at two hours’ notice, when much of our equipment was still unissued. There were terrible tumults in the quartermaster’s store; in the end numbers of men had to leave without their full equipment. The barracks had promptly filled with women who seemed to have sprung up from the ground and were helping their men-folk to roll their blankets and pack their kit-bags. It was rather humiliating that I had to be shown how to put on my new leather cartridge-boxes by a Spanish girl, the wife of Williams, the other English militiaman. She was a gentle, dark-eyed, intensely feminine creature who looked as though her life— work was to rock a cradle, but who as a matter of fact had fought bravely in the street-battles of July. At this time she was carrying a baby which was born just ten months after the outbreak of war and had perhaps been begotten behind a barricade.

The train was due to leave at eight, and it was about ten past eight when the harassed, sweating officers managed to marshal us in the barrack square. I remember very vividly the torchlit scene—the uproar and excitement, the red flags flapping in the torchlight, the massed ranks of militiamen with their knapsacks on their backs and their rolled blankets worn bandolier-wise across the shoulder; and the shouting and the clatter of boots and tin pannikins, and then a tremendous and finally successful hissing for silence; and then some political commissar standing beneath a huge rolling red banner and making us a speech in Catalan. Finally they marched us to the station, taking the longest route, three or four miles, so as to show us to the whole town. In the Ramblas they halted us while a borrowed band played some revolutionary tune or other. Once again the conquering-hero stuff—shouting and enthusiasm, red flags and red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging the pavement to have a look at us, women waving from the windows. How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight with men that there was barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the last moment Williams’s wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle of wine and a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea. The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called “Sex Is Fun-or Hell.” She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

   She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

   With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left–the wet–hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and–it was the fifth or sixth ring–picked up the phone.

   “Hello,” she said, keeping the fingers of her left hand outstretched and away from her white silk dressing gown, which was all that she was wearing, except mules–her rings were in the bathroom.

   “I have your call to New York now, Mrs. Glass,” the operator said.

   “Thank you,” said the girl, and made room on the night table for the ashtray.

   A woman's voice came through. “Muriel? Is that you?”

   The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. “Yes, Mother. How are you?” she said.

   “I've been worried to death about you. Why haven't you phoned? Are you all right?”

   “I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here's been–”

   “Are you all right, Muriel?”

   The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. “I'm fine. I'm hot. This is the hottest day they've had in Florida in–”

   “Why haven't you called me? I've been worried to–”

   “Mother, darling, don't yell at me. I can hear you beautifully,” said the girl. “I called you twice last night. Once just after–”

   “I told your father you'd probably call last night. But, no, he had to-Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth.”

   “I'm fine. Stop asking me that, please.”

   “When did you get there?”

   “I don't know. Wednesday morning, early.”

   “Who drove?”

   “He did,” said the girl. “And don't get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed.”

   “He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of–”

   “Mother,” the girl interrupted, “I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact.”

   “Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?”

   “I said he drove very nicely, Mother. Now, please. I asked him to stay close to the white line, and all, and he knew what I meant, and he did. He was even trying not to look at the trees-you could tell. Did Daddy get the car fixed, incidentally?”

   “Not yet. They want four hundred dollars, just to–”

   “Mother, Seymour told Daddy that he'd pay for it. There's no reason for–”

   “Well, we'll see. How did he behave–in the car and all?”

   “All right,” said the girl.

   “Did he keep calling you that awful–”

   “No. He has something new now.”

   “What?”

   “Oh, what's the difference, Mother?”

   “Muriel, I want to know. Your father–”

   “All right, all right. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948,” the girl said, and giggled.

   “It isn't funny, Muriel. It isn't funny at all. It's horrible. It's sad, actually. When I think how–”

   “Mother,” the girl interrupted, “listen to me. You remember that book he sent me from Germany? You know–those German poems. What'd I do with it? I've been racking my–”

   “You have it.”

   “Are you sure?” said the girl.

   “Certainly. That is, I have it. It's in Freddy's room. You left it here and I didn't have room for it in the–Why? Does he want it?”

   “No. Only, he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I'd read it.”

   “It was in German!”

   “Yes, dear. That doesn't make any difference,” said the girl, crossing her legs. “He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should've bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please.”

   “Awful. Awful. It's sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night–”

   “Just a second, Mother,” the girl said. She went over to the window seat for her cigarettes, lit one, and returned to her seat on the bed. “Mother?” she said, exhaling smoke.

   “Muriel. Now, listen to me.”

   “I'm listening.”

   “Your father talked to Dr. Sivetski.”

   “Oh?” said the girl.

   “He told him everything. At least, he said he did–you know your father. The trees. That business with the window. Those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away. What he did with all those lovely pictures from Bermuda–everything.”

   “Well?” said the girl.

   “Well. In the first place, he said it was a perfect crime the Army released him from the hospital–my word of honor. He very definitely told your father there's a chance–a very great chance, he said–that Seymour may completely lose control of himself. My word of honor.”

   “There's a psychiatrist here at the hotel,” said the girl.

   “Who? What's his name?”

   “I don't know. Rieser or something. He's supposed to be very good.”

   “Never heard of him.”

   “Well, he's supposed to be very good, anyway.”

   “Muriel, don't be fresh, please. We're very worried about you. Your father wanted to wire you last night to come home, as a matter of f–”

   “I'm not coming home right now, Mother. So relax.”

   “Muriel. My word of honor. Dr. Sivetski said Seymour may completely lose contr–”

   “I just got here, Mother. This is the first vacation I've had in years, and I'm not going to just pack everything and come home,” said the girl. “I couldn't travel now anyway. I'm so sunburned I can hardly move.”

   “You're badly sunburned? Didn't you use that jar of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right–”

   “I used it. I'm burned anyway.”

   “That's terrible. Where are you burned?”

   “All over, dear, all over.”

   “That's terrible.”

   “I'll live.”

   “Tell me, did you talk to this psychiatrist?”

   “Well, sort of,” said the girl.

   “What'd he say? Where was Seymour when you talked to him?”

   “In the Ocean Room, playing the piano. He's played the piano both nights we've been here.”

   “Well, what'd he say?”

   “Oh, nothing much. He spoke to me first. I was sitting next to him at Bingo last night, and he asked me if that wasn't my husband playing the piano in the other room. I said yes, it was, and he asked me if Seymour's been sick or something. So I said–”

   “Why'd he ask that?”

   “I don't know, Mother. I guess because he's so pale and all,” said the girl. “Anyway, after Bingo he and his wife asked me if I wouldn't like to join them for a drink. So I did. His wife was horrible. You remember that awful dinner dress we saw in Bonwit's window? The one you said you'd have to have a tiny, tiny–”

   “The green?”

   “She had it on. And all hips. She kept asking me if Seymour's related to that Suzanne Glass that has that place on Madison Avenue–the millinery.”

   “What'd he say, though? The doctor.”

   “Oh. Well, nothing much, really. I mean we were in the bar and all. It was terribly noisy.”

   “Yes, but did–did you tell him what he tried to do with Granny's chair?”

   “No, Mother. I didn't go into details very much,” said the girl. “I'll probably get a chance to talk to him again. He's in the bar all day long.”

   “Did he say he thought there was a chance he might get–you know–funny or anything? Do something to you!”

   “Not exactly,” said the girl. “He had to have more facts, Mother. They have to know about your childhood–all that stuff. I told you, we could hardly talk, it was so noisy in there.”

   “Well. How's your blue coat?”

   “All right. I had some of the padding taken out.”

   “How are the clothes this year?”

   “Terrible. But out of this world. You see sequins–everything,” said the girl.

   “How's your room?”

   “All right. Just all right, though. We couldn't get the room we had before the war,” said the girl. “The people are awful this year. You should see what sits next to us in the dining room. At the next table. They look as if they drove down in a truck.”

   “Well, it's that way all over. How's your ballerina?”

   “It's too long. I told you it was too long.”

   “Muriel, I'm only going to ask you once more–are you really all right?”

   “Yes, Mother,” said the girl. “For the ninetieth time.”

   “And you don't want to come home?”

   “No, Mother.”

   “Your father said last night that he'd be more than willing to pay for it if you'd go away someplace by yourself and think things over. You could take a lovely cruise. We both thought–”

   “No, thanks,” said the girl, and uncrossed her legs. “Mother, this call is costing a for–”

   “When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war-I mean when you think of all those crazy little wives who–”

   “Mother,” said the girl, “we'd better hang up. Seymour may come in any minute.”

   “Where is he?”

   “On the beach.”

   “On the beach? By himself? Does he behave himself on the beach?”

   “Mother,” said the girl, “you talk about him as though he were a raving maniac–”

   “I said nothing of the kind, Muriel.”

   “Well, you sound that way. I mean all he does is lie there. He won't take his bathrobe off.”

   “He won't take his bathrobe off? Why not?”

   “I don't know. I guess because he's so pale.”

   “My goodness, he needs the sun. Can't you make him?

   “You know Seymour,” said the girl, and crossed her legs again. “He says he doesn't want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo.”

   “He doesn't have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?”

   “No, Mother. No, dear,” said the girl, and stood up. “Listen, I'll call you tomorrow, maybe.”

   “Muriel. Now, listen to me.”

   “Yes, Mother,” said the girl, putting her weight on her right leg.

   “Call me the instant he does, or says, anything at all funny–you know what I mean. Do you hear me?”

   “Mother, I'm not afraid of Seymour.”

   “Muriel, I want you to promise me.”

   “All right, I promise. Goodbye, Mother,” said the girl. “My love to Daddy.” She hung up.

   “See more glass,” said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. “Did you see more glass?”

   “Pussycat, stop saying that. It's driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please.”

   Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil's shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, winglike blades of her back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.

   “It was really just an ordinary silk handkerchief–you could see when you got up close,” said the woman in the beach chair beside Mrs. Carpenter's. “I wish I knew how she tied it. It was really darling.”

   “It sounds darling,” Mrs. Carpenter agreed. “Sybil, hold still, pussy.”

   “Did you see more glass?” said Sybil.

   Mrs. Carpenter sighed. “All right,” she said. She replaced the cap on the sun-tan oil bottle. “Now run and play, pussy. Mommy's going up to the hotel and have a Martini with Mrs. Hubbel. I'll bring you the olive.”

   Set loose, Sybil immediately ran down to the flat part of the beach and began to walk in the direction of Fisherman's Pavilion. Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle, she was soon out of the area reserved for guests of the hotel.

   She walked for about a quarter of a mile and then suddenly broke into an oblique run up the soft part of the beach. She stopped short when she reached the place where a young man was lying on his back.

   “Are you going in the water, see more glass?” she said.

   The young man started, his right hand going to the lapels of his terry-cloth robe. He turned over on his stomach, letting a sausaged towel fall away from his eyes, and squinted up at Sybil.

   “Hey. Hello, Sybil.”

   “Are you going in the water?”

   “I was waiting for you,” said the young man. “What's new?”

   “What?” said Sybil.

   “What's new? What's on the program?”

   “My daddy's coming tomorrow on a nairiplane,” Sybil said, kicking sand.

   “Not in my face, baby,” the young man said, putting his hand on Sybil's ankle. “Well, it's about time he got here, your daddy. I've been expecting him hourly. Hourly.”

   “Where's the lady?” Sybil said.

   “The lady?” the young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. “That's hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser's. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children, in her room.” Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. “Ask me something else, Sybil,” he said. “That's a fine bathing suit you have on. If there's one thing I like, it's a blue bathing suit.”

   Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. “This is a yellow,” she said. “This is a yellow.”

   “It is? Come a little closer.” Sybil took a step forward. “You're absolutely right. What a fool I am.”

   “Are you going in the water?” Sybil said.

   “I'm seriously considering it. I'm giving it plenty of thought, Sybil, you'll be glad to know.”

   Sybil prodded the rubber float that the young man sometimes used as a head-rest. “It needs air,” she said.

   “You're right. It needs more air than I'm willing to admit.” He took away his fists and let his chin rest on the sand. “Sybil,” he said, “you're looking fine. It's good to see you. Tell me about yourself.” He reached in front of him and took both of Sybil's ankles in his hands. “I'm Capricorn,” he said. “What are you?”

   “Sharon Lipschutz said you let her sit on the piano seat with you,” Sybil said.

   “Sharon Lipschutz said that?”

   Sybil nodded vigorously.

   He let go of her ankles, drew in his hands, and laid the side of his face on his right forearm. “Well,” he said, “you know how those things happen, Sybil. I was sitting there, playing. And you were nowhere in sight. And Sharon Lipschutz came over and sat down next to me. I couldn't push her off, could I?”

   “Yes.”

   “Oh, no. No. I couldn't do that,” said the young man. “I'll tell you what I did do, though.”

   “What?”

   “I pretended she was you.”

   Sybil immediately stooped and began to dig in the sand. “Let's go in the water,” she said.

   “All right,” said the young man. “I think I can work it in.”

   “Next time, push her off,” Sybil said. “Push who off?”

   “Sharon Lipschutz.”

   “Ah, Sharon Lipschutz,” said the young man. “How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire.” He suddenly got to his feet. He looked at the ocean. “Sybil,” he said, “I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll see if we can catch a bananafish.”

   “A what?”

   “A bananafish,” he said, and undid the belt of his robe. He took off the robe. His shoulders were white and narrow, and his trunks were royal blue. He folded the robe, first lengthwise, then in thirds. He unrolled the towel he had used over his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil's hand.

   The two started to walk down to the ocean.

   “I imagine you've seen quite a few bananafish in your day,” the young man said.

   Sybil shook her head.

   “You haven't? Where do you live, anyway?”

   “I don't know,” said Sybil.

   “Sure you know. You must know. Sharon Lipschutz knows where she lives and she's only three and a half.”

   Sybil stopped walking and yanked her hand away from him. She picked up an ordinary beach shell and looked at it with elaborate interest. She threw it down. “Whirly Wood, Connecticut,” she said, and resumed walking, stomach foremost.

   “Whirly Wood, Connecticut,” said the young man. “Is that anywhere near Whirly Wood, Connecticut, by any chance?”

   Sybil looked at him. “That's where I live,” she said impatiently. “I live in Whirly Wood, Connecticut.” She ran a few steps ahead of him, caught up her left foot in her left hand, and hopped two or three times.

   “You have no idea how clear that makes everything,” the young man said.

   Sybil released her foot. “Did you read `Little Black Sambo'?” she said.

   “It's very funny you ask me that,” he said. “It so happens I just finished reading it last night.” He reached down and took back Sybil's hand. “What did you think of it?” he asked her.

   “Did the tigers run all around that tree?”

   “I thought they'd never stop. I never saw so many tigers.”

   “There were only six,” Sybil said.

   “Only six!” said the young man. “Do you call that only?”

   “Do you like wax?” Sybil asked.

   “Do I like what?” asked the young man. “Wax.”

   “Very much. Don't you?”

   Sybil nodded. “Do you like olives?” she asked.

   “Olives–yes. Olives and wax. I never go anyplace without 'em.”

   “Do you like Sharon Lipschutz?” Sybil asked.

   “Yes. Yes, I do,” said the young man. “What I like particularly about her is that she never does anything mean to little dogs in the lobby of the hotel. That little toy bull that belongs to that lady from Canada, for instance. You probably won't believe this, but some little girls like to poke that little dog with balloon sticks. Sharon doesn't. She's never mean or unkind. That's why I like her so much.”

   Sybil was silent.

   “I like to chew candles,” she said finally.

   “Who doesn't?” said the young man, getting his feet wet. “Wow! It's cold.” He dropped the rubber float on its back. “No, wait just a second, Sybil. Wait'll we get out a little bit.”

   They waded out till the water was up to Sybil's waist. Then the young man picked her up and laid her down on her stomach on the float.

   “Don't you ever wear a bathing cap or anything?” he asked.

   “Don't let go,” Sybil ordered. “You hold me, now.”

   “Miss Carpenter. Please. I know my business,” the young man said. “You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish. This is a perfect day for bananafish.”

   “I don't see any,” Sybil said.

   “That's understandable. Their habits are very peculiar.” He kept pushing the float. The water was not quite up to his chest. “They lead a very tragic life,” he said. “You know what they do, Sybil?”

   She shook her head.

   “Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas.” He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. “Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door.”

   “Not too far out,” Sybil said. “What happens to them?”

   “What happens to who?”

   “The bananafish.”

   “Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can't get out of the banana hole?”

   “Yes,” said Sybil.

   “Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die.”

   “Why?” asked Sybil.

   “Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease.”

   “Here comes a wave,” Sybil said nervously.

   “We'll ignore it. We'll snub it,” said the young man. “Two snobs.” He took Sybil's ankles in his hands and pressed down and forward. The float nosed over the top of the wave. The water soaked Sybil's blond hair, but her scream was full of pleasure.

   With her hand, when the float was level again, she wiped away a flat, wet band of hair from her eyes, and reported, “I just saw one.”

   “Saw what, my love?”

   “A bananafish.”

   “My God, no!” said the young man. “Did he have any bananas in his mouth?”

   “Yes,” said Sybil. “Six.”

The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil's wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch.

   “Hey!” said the owner of the foot, turning around.

   “Hey, yourself We're going in now. You had enough?”

   “No!”

   “Sorry,” he said, and pushed the float toward shore until Sybil got off it. He carried it the rest of the way.

   “Goodbye,” said Sybil, and ran without regret in the direction of the hotel.

   The young man put on his robe, closed the lapels tight, and jammed his towel into his pocket. He picked up the slimy wet, cumbersome float and put it under his arm. He plodded alone through the soft, hot sand toward the hotel.

   On the sub-main floor of the hotel, which the management directed bathers to use, a woman with zinc salve on her nose got into the elevator with the young man.

   “I see you're looking at my feet,” he said to her when the car was in motion.

   “I beg your pardon?” said the woman.

   “I said I see you're looking at my feet.”

   “I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor,” said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.

   “If you want to look at my feet, say so,” said the young man. “But don't be a God-damned sneak about it.”

   “Let me out here, please,” the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.

   The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.

   “I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them,” said the young man. “Five, please.” He took his room key out of his robe pocket.

   He got off at the fifth floor, walked down the hall, and let himself into 507. The room smelled of new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover.

   He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.

The British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures—Churchill is the other—whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified—more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass—truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California—and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an admirer.)

The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing. But the double vision of the man creates something of a transatlantic misunderstanding. If in England he is subject to condescension, his admirers here have made him hostage to a cult. “The Narnian” (HarperSanFrancisco; $25.95), a new life of Lewis by his disciple Alan Jacobs, is an instance of that sectarian enthusiasm. Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in its effects from derision. Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.

In England, the more representative biography of Lewis is the acidic though generally admiring life that A. N. Wilson published some fifteen years ago. It gives Lewis his due without forcing stained-glass spectacles on the reader. (Wilson is quite clear, for instance, about Lewis’s weird and complicated sex life.) While William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands,” in all its play, movie, and television versions, shows the priggish Lewis finally humanized by sex with an American Jewish matron, it actually reflects the British, rather than the American, view: Lewis as a prig to be saved from priggishness, rather than as a saint who saved others from their sins.

None of this would matter much if it weren’t for Narnia. The seven tales of the English children who cross over, through a wardrobe, into a land where animals speak and lions rule, which Lewis began in the late nineteen-forties, are classics in the only sense that matters—books that are read a full generation after their author is gone. They have become, to be sure, highly controversial classics: the wonderful British fantasist Philip Pullman has excoriated their racism (the ogres are dark-skinned and almond-eyed), their nasty little-Englandness, and their narrow-hearted religiosity. But they are part of the common imagination of childhood, and, with the release of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as the first of a series of film adaptations, they are likely—if the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is any indication—to become still more deeply implanted.

The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.

The early, appealing part of Lewis’s life is extremely well told in his own 1955 memoir, “Surprised by Joy.” He was born in 1898, into a rough and ready but pious Ulster Protestant family in Belfast; his father was dense and eccentric—a man with “more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever met,” his exasperated son wrote much later—and his mother, who died before Lewis turned ten, was warm and loving and simple. The key relation in his life was with his older brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a taste for reading and even a private language and mythology, and to whom he remained close throughout Warnie’s long, unhappy, and, later, alcoholic life.

Above all, the young Lewis, often in company with his brother, read and walked. He was the sort of kid who is moved to tears every day by poems and trees. He loved landscape and twilight, myth and fairy tale, particularly the Irish landscape near their suburban home, and the stories of George MacDonald. Now too easily overlooked in the history of fantasy, MacDonald’s stories (“At the Back of the North Wind,” “The Princess and the Goblin,” and, most of all, “Phantastes”) evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure—a kind of shining sense of goodness and romance and light. Lewis called this emotion, simply, the “Joy.” With it came the feeling that both the world and the words were trying to tell him something—not just that there is something good out there but that there is something big out there. The young Lewis found this magic in things as different as Beatrix Potter and Longfellow, “Paradise Lost” and Norse myth. “They taught me longing,” he said, and made him a “votary of the Blue Flower,” after a story by the German poet Novalis, in which a youth dreams of a blue flower and spends his life searching for it. The Christianity he knew in childhood, by contrast, seemed the opposite of magic and joy: dull sermons and dry moral equations to be solved.

This loving and mother-deprived boy was sent to a series of nightmarish English boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied and traumatized beyond even the normal expectations of English adolescence. Lewis’s own words about the places are practically Leninist. (One headmaster raced down the length of a room with his cane to beat a lower-middle-class boy, enraged by his social pretensions.) Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”

A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he kept an inner life. Joy kept him alive—and it is possible that the absence of happiness allowed an access of joy. When he served on the Western Front, in 1917, he got what every soldier wanted—an honest wound honestly come by but bad enough to send him home. Still, he saw the trenches as they really were, and though he chose largely to forget, and tried to deprecate the importance of “the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles,” he admitted, in later years, that he had had nightmares about it for the rest of his life.

Oxford always seemed like joy to escapees from public schools; add the Western Front, and it must have seemed like something close to paradise. After Lewis’s first long residence there, upon his departure from the Army, in 1918, he never left Oxford again, except, at the end, for Cambridge. He took a first in classics, and then made a decision, slightly daring in those days, when teaching English literature seemed as swinging as teaching media studies does now, to become a tutor in English; he soon became a fellow in English at Magdalen College. (He also took up with a much older married woman, with whom he had a long affair that may have had a sadomasochistic tinge.)

Jacobs is a bit touristy about Magdalen’s charms; Wilson is much better, tartly and accurately describing how the system of tutorials, seemingly so seductive—an essay delivered each week by the pupil, and analyzed and critiqued by the tutor—helps turn the tutors, from sheer exhaustion and self-protection, into caricatures of themselves, rather as the girls in a lap-dance club take on exotic names and characters. Lewis, the sensitive and soft-spoken young hiker, took on the part of a bluff, hearty Irishman, all tweed and pipe. It is this Lewis who became an Oxford legend, smoking in darkened rooms and holding “Beer and Beowulf” evenings in his rooms. He held to the narrow anti-modern curriculum then in place at Oxford, and befriended a young philologist named J. R. R. Tolkien, whose views on teaching English were even more severe than Lewis’s: Tolkien thought that literature ended at 1100.

Lewis had a reputation as a tough but inspiring teacher, and, reading his letters, one can see why. His literary judgments are full of discovery; his allegiance to a dry, historical approach in the university didn’t keep him from having bracingly clear critical opinions about modern books, all of them independent and most of them right. He got the greatness of Wodehouse long before it was fashionable to do so, appreciated Trollope over Thackeray, and could admire even writers as seemingly unsympathetic to him as Woolf and Kafka. He was a partisan without being a bigot.

It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one. Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was, ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that the liberal humanism in which they had been raised failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.

This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right. (He liked this argument so much that he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia books; either Lucy is lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what she claimed to see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by every institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he works in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as Gladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much resented.

If believing shut Lewis off from writing well about belief, it did get him to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales. The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together. His first important book, and his best, is “The Allegory of Love,” a study of epic poetry that Lewis began writing soon after his conversion. It is full of enthusiasm for and appreciation of the allegorical epics of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, et al.—but it also makes a profound historical argument about the literary imagination. Until the time of Tasso and Ariosto, he points out, writers had two worlds available to them: the actual world of experience and the world of their religion. Only since the Renaissance had writers had a third world, of the marvellous, of free mythological invention, which is serious but in which the author does not really believe or make an article of faith. In Ariosto, Lewis found the beginnings of that “free creation of the marvelous,” slipping in under the guise of allegory:

The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. . . . But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. . . . The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils. . . . Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining. . . . The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvelous that knows itself as myth.

When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.

Yet, if these words are a declaration of faith, they are also a document of bad conscience. For, throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say.

Marvellous writing in our culture has two homes, children’s literature and science fiction, and in his forties Lewis began to work in both. His first effort, the trilogy that begins with “Out of the Silent Planet,” is essentially science fiction written against science. What is really out there is not more machines but bigger mysteries. But these books are lacking in vitality, and seem worked out rather than lived in. They are filled with a kind of easy Blimpish polemics—the bad scientists are fat and smelly, or atheists. It was only in the late forties, when he began to write, quickly and almost carelessly, about the magic world of Narnia, that he began to find a deeper vein of feeling.

What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.

When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by the allegorical impulse. Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory. The Blessed Land across the sea is a retreat for the already immortal, not, except for Frodo, a reward for the afflicted; dead is dead. The pathos of Aragorn and Arwen’s marriage is that, after Aragorn’s death, they will never meet again, in Valinor or elsewhere. It is the modernity of the existential arrangement, in tension with the archaicism of the material culture, that makes Tolkien’s myth haunting. In the final Narnia book, “The Last Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.

A startling thing in Lewis’s letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe. In his extended essay “The Problem of Pain,” which appeared, propitiously, in 1940, and in his novel “The Screwtape Letters,” two years later—these are written to a younger devil by an older one—Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has an easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots. Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run. This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps.

An old Oxford tradition claims that Bertrand Russell, on being asked why his concerns had turned so dramatically away from academic philosophy, replied, with great dignity, “Because I discovered fucking.” So did Lewis, only he was older. The story of how Lewis came to be seduced by a married woman named—for fate is a cornier screenwriter than even man is—Joy is so well told in the “Shadowlands” film that one is almost inclined to imagine it overdrawn. But, indeed, the real Joy Davidman, a spirited Jewish matron from Westchester who had been impressed by Lewis’s books, was not delicate and transcendent but foulmouthed, passionate, a little embarrassing. She drove away his more bearishly single-minded Oxford friends, including Tolkien. Fierce and independent-minded (she was played by Debra Winger in the movie but seems more Barbra Streisand in life), Davidman was a Christian convert who never lost her native oomph. After she Yokoishly insinuated herself into Lewis’s life, in the early fifties, she also brought him passion. They “feasted on love,” Lewis wrote. “No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.” That’s a lot of crannies for a middle-aged don to be satisfying, but it had a happy effect on his mind and on his prose.

It is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this story, becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of salvation through love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had two kids for him to help take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems to have happened. Lewis, to the dismay of his friends, went from being a private prig and common-room hearty to being a mensch—a C. of E. mensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer, a few years later, he was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief Portrayed,” one of the finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without abandoning his God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less joblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather than a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.

“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and particularly for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of the urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street lamp in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock of crying white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving Narnian animals in “Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger hole and part French Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s description of his lost Northern home in “The Horse and His Boy,” called Narnia but so clearly a British composite (“Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, of the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests”)—these are why Lewis will be remembered.

For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. Most combatants in the Bug Wars—which were, in fact, origami contests—were members of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to try outdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects. They engaged in the Bug Wars after one of the Detectives displayed what the group’s Web site calls “an incredible secret weapon”—a horned beetle with outspread wings, which he had folded from a single sheet of paper. “Then the origami insect war got full-scale,” the English translation of the Web site continues. “They compared their confident models with others at their monthly meetings, and losers left with chagrin.” During the Bug Wars, Lang was not yet a professional origami artist; he was a research scientist at Spectra Diode Labs, in San Jose, who did some paper folding on the side. He was busy at work—in 1993, the year of the Menacing Mantis, for instance, he patented a self-collimated resonator laser and worked on fibre-optic networks for space satellites—so he usually wasn’t able to travel to Japan to hand-deliver his bug of the month. Instead, he would e-mail his design to an ally in Tokyo, who would fold it and present it to the Detectives on Lang’s behalf.

At the time, Lang was in his thirties. He had been doing origami—that is, shaping sheets of paper into figures, using no cutting and no glue—for twenty-five years and designing his own models for twenty. He has always considered himself very much a bug person, but his earliest designs were not insects; in the nineteen-seventies, he invented an origami Jimmy Carter, a Darth Vader, a nun, an inflatable bunny, and an Arnold the Pig. He would have liked to have folded insects, but, in those years, bugs, as well as crustaceans, were still an origami impossibility. This was because no one had yet solved the problem of how to fold paper into figures with fat bodies and skinny appendages, so that most origami figures, even television characters and heads of state, still had the same basic shape as the paper cranes of nineteenth-century Japan. Then a few people around the globe had the idea that paper folding, besides being a pleasant diversion, might also have properties that could be analyzed and codified. Some started to study paper folding mathematically; others, including Lang, began devising mathematical tools to help with designing, all of which enabled the development of increasingly complex folding techniques. In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything—medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA—that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way. By the end of the Bug Wars, origami had completely changed, and so had Robert Lang. In 2001, he left his job—he was then at the fibre-optics company JDS Uniphase, in San Jose—to fold paper full time.

Lang is accustomed to being surprising. Some years ago, he was the mystery guest on the television game show “Naruhodo! Za Warudo”—the Japanese version of “What’s My Line?”—and he amazed the audience and the contestants, because they couldn’t believe that an American could be an origami expert. People who know him as a scientist are flabbergasted when they hear that he is one of the world’s foremost paper-folding artists, and are often surprised that such a thing as a professional origami artist even exists. People expecting him to be kooky—or, at the very least, Japanese—find his academic accomplishments and his white male Americanness puzzling. Recently, he was commissioned by Lalique, the French crystal company, to demonstrate folding at a launch for its new collection of vases, which are rippled and creased in an origami-like way. The launch was at a Neiman Marcus in Troy, Michigan, on a cold night just before Christmas. It was intended for Neiman Marcus’s favorite customers, and there was music playing and waiters offering hors d’oeuvres and glasses of wine. Lang was set up in the china-and-crystal department, behind a Regency-style desk. On one side of the desk was a stack of thin, square sheets of Japanese origami paper, as brightly colored as a roll of Life Savers. He had with him a laptop computer, and during a break he showed me software that he was designing with his brother, a botany professor, which simulates the growth of cherry trees and will allow farmers to test pruning and fertilizing techniques on a computer, rather than in their orchards. Lang is now forty-five. He is tall, with slim, fine-looking hands, a tidy Silicon Valley-style beard, and the clean, comfortable good looks of a park ranger. That evening, he was wearing a Glen-plaid sports jacket, a tie, and slacks. He settled into his chair and began creasing a sheet of paper into what would become perhaps a bird or a dinosaur or a tarantula. A woman in a knee-length shearling coat wandered over to watch. She stared at Lang’s hands and then took fuller stock of him. After a moment, she nudged her husband, who was standing beside her, slightly bent under the weight of four shopping bags.

“My God, look,” she said, pointing to Lang. “He’s in a suit!”

Lang stopped folding and looked up at her.

“It’s just . . . to see an artist all clean and dressed, and in a suit,” she sputtered.

Lang smiled and said, “Well, my kimono was at the cleaners.” He resumed folding.

“You’re good at the origami,” the woman said. “Have you done other jobs?”

Lang said, “Yes, in fact, I have. For years, I was a physicist.”

The woman grabbed her husband’s arm again and gasped, “Oh, my God!” While she was recovering, two men ambled up. “Do people, like, pay you?” one of them asked. Before Lang could answer, the other guy, brandishing a baby lamb chop, asked if he knew how to make the Statue of Liberty.

“Yes, I do,” Lang said. “I’m not going to make it right now, but I do know how to do it.” He put aside the piece he was working on, and took a new sheet of paper from the stack. He creased it, flipped the paper over, creased it again, lined up the edges, smoothed the sides together, pinched it here and there, and tugged on one edge. He did this with quick, meticulous movements, his hands crossing back and forth over the sheet as if they were tracing a melody. Suddenly, the sheet of paper crumpled and then opened into a shape—a tiny violinist, sawing away at a violin.

“That’s just crazy, man,” the guy holding the lamb chop said. “I mean, wow.”

Lang grew up outside Atlanta. He was given an origami book when he was six by a teacher who had run out of ways to keep him entertained during math class. Lang took to origami immediately. He was fascinated by the infinite possibilities within the finite-seeming—the characters and the creatures that could almost magically come to life from an ordinary square of paper. He worked his way through the designs in one book and then another and another. He had many interests—stamps, coins, plants, bugs, mud—and he was, as his father, Jim Lang, says, “a super-duper math whiz,” hooked on Martin Gardner’s recreational math column in Scientific American. But paper folding engaged him most. He started designing his own origami patterns when he was in his early teens. He diagrammed them in detail on letterhead from the Chrysler Corporation Airtemp Division, where his father was in sales.

Lang went to college at Caltech, where he studied electrical engineering. “Caltech was very hard, very intense,” he told me recently. “So I did more origami. It was a release from the pressure of school. I’d fold things, record the design, and then throw the model away.” He had never met anyone else who did origami, and he didn’t tell people about his pastime. His wife, Diane, whom he met at Caltech when they both had roles in a campus production of “The Music Man,” remembers visiting his apartment in Pasadena for the first time and finding little paper ants lining the shelves. “I guess I thought it was a kid’s pastime that I hadn’t grown out of,” Lang said. “I was a little embarrassed about it.” In the back of one of his origami books, he noticed the name and address of the Origami Center of America, which was founded by Lillian Oppenheimer, and was the precursor to OrigamiUSA, the national organization for paper-folding enthusiasts. Through the group, which is based in New York and now has close to two thousand members, Lang met other recreational folders and also people known in the origami world as “masters,” including Michael LaFosse, John Montroll, Joseph Wu, and Paul Jackson. LaFosse trained as a marine biologist but left his job in environmental management in 1994 to open the country’s first origami-only gallery, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and was getting as much as twenty thousand dollars for such commissions as a Pegasus for an Hermès window display on Madison Avenue. Wu was a commercial illustrator, in Canada, who did origami most of the time, and Jackson, now in Israel, was an artist working with folded paper. Montroll, the son of a well-known physicist, had quit his job as an electrical engineer and become an origami-book publisher to support his folding habit. Montroll, in particular, inspired Lang: his animals were elegant and meticulous and his approach to design was totally original. He also made origami models of complex polyhedra that no one had thought possible. “John has done models in origami of all the Archimedean solids! All the Platonic solids! All the Johnson solids!” Lang said excitedly. “He did all the polyhedra!”

Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation—“Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties”—he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.

The Japanese have been folding paper recreationally for at least four hundred years. For the first two hundred of those years, designs were limited to a few basic shapes: boxes, boats, hats, cranes. Folding a thousand cranes—all of white paper, which was the only kind then used—was thought to bring good luck. The principle was simple. The sheet of paper was the essence: no matter what shape it became, there was never more paper and never less; it remained the same sheet. Japanese folding probably didn’t spread directly to the West. There is no definitive history, although David Lister, a retired solicitor in Grimsby, England, and the author of more than a hundred essays on the subject, suggests that paper folding developed independently in countries all over the world. In the nineteenth century, schoolchildren in Germany, France, and England made paper horses with riders, and boxes to trap flies, and it is reported that paper folding flourished in Spanish villages and prisons.

In 1837, a German educator, Friedrich Fröbel, introduced the radical idea of early-childhood education—kindergarten. The curriculum included three kinds of paper folding—“The Folds of Truth,” “The Folds of Life,” and “The Folds of Beauty”—to teach children principles of math and art. The kindergarten movement was embraced around the world, including in Japan, where Fröbel’s simple folds merged with traditional origami. Japanese magicians of the time also began doing paper tricks as part of their conjuring. By the eighteen-sixties, Japan’s isolationism was ending, and in the following decades those magicians travelled to Europe and the United States to perform. Suddenly, the kindergarten exercise appeared mysterious and wonderful. A square of ordinary paper creased and crinkled could come to life as a flapping gull; a sheet of parchment could take shape as a lion or a swallowtail. Professional magicians in Europe and the United States loved origami, and a number of them wrote books about it. In 1922, Harry Houdini published “Houdini’s Paper Magic: The Whole Art of Performing with Paper, Including Paper Tearing, Paper Folding and Paper Puzzles.” (He regularly did a trick known as “the troublewit,” turning a piece of paper into an endless number of different shapes without any cuts.) In 1928, the stage magicians William Murray and Francis Rigney published “Fun with Paperfolding,” with chapters on square folding, diagonal folding, and a complete paper-folding stage routine titled “How Charlie Bought His Boat.”

In the mid-nineteen-forties, the American folklorist Gershon Legman began studying origami. Legman was a man of diverse inclinations: he collected vulgar limericks, wrote a book about oral techniques in sexual gratification, and is credited with having invented the vibrating dildo when he was only twenty. After becoming interested in origami, he made contact with paper-folders around the world—most significantly, Akira Yoshizawa, a Japanese prodigy who, before being recognized as an extraordinary talent, made a meagre living by selling fish appetizers door-to-door in Tokyo. What made Yoshizawa extraordinary was that he presented the art for the first time as a medium that could be creative and expressive—he devised tens of thousands of models, and was particularly famous for his gorillas. In 1955, Legman organized an exhibition of Yoshizawa’s work at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam. Yoshizawa got even more notice the following year, when Robert Harbin published his book “Paper Magic.” Harbin was the preëminent British magician—he was the first to appear on television, and he developed the now classic “Zig-Zag Girl” illusion, in which the magician puts his assistant into a cabinet and saws her into thirds. His book, a best-seller, praised Yoshizawa, whose work was such a departure that it might have seemed that there was no further you could go with a single piece of paper and some folds.

One clear, chilly day not long ago, I met Lang at Squid Labs, a high-tech research-and-development company headquartered in an enormous concrete building that used to be part of the Alameda Naval Air Station, near Oakland. Lang and his wife and their teen-age son live about twenty miles east of Oakland, in a comfortable ranch-style house that has a separate studio building in the back yard, where Lang works amid a clutter of math books, seashell guides, computers, and a menagerie of paper animals. He was spending the day at Squid Labs to use its industrial laser cutter to help him crease paper for some complex folds. He said that he may be the first origami artist to use a laser cutter, which he dials down to a smidgen of its power, so that it scores the paper rather than slices it. Lang was working on paper prototypes for two commissions—one for an interior-design piece to be made of metal, another for a leather fashion accessory—and on a design he was making for himself, which he didn’t want to describe, in case he jinxed it. All three of the designs were so intricate that it would have taken him hours just to crease the paper in preparation for the final folds. He was using large squares of tweedy-looking mauve Hanji paper from Korea, which is sturdy but still slightly translucent, like the flesh of a fish. It is one of his favorite papers; he buys it in bulk from an online supplier. Other papers he likes, which he gets from art stores in San Francisco and Japan, when he visits, are lokta, from Nepal; unryu, from Thailand; and kozo and gampi, from Japan. When he makes his most complex insects, he uses handmade paper from Michael LaFosse’s studio. For a while, in fact, LaFosse had a paper in stock called Robert Lang Insect Paper.

Lang was, by all accounts, good at his science jobs: he wrote more than eighty technical papers and holds forty-six patents on lasers and optoelectronics. All the while, he was plotting how he would find time to write origami books. He published several while he was still in the laser world, starting with “The Complete Book of Origami,” in 1989, but he knew that it would require all his time to write the one he had in mind, which, instead of providing patterns for folders to follow—the typical origami book—would teach them how to design their own.

The bad luck of the dot-com bust turned out to be good timing for him. Beginning in 2000, JDS Uniphase, which supplied components to computer companies, lost much of its business, so Lang’s duties shifted from overseeing research and development to managing pay cuts and plant closings. “Laying people off was a lot less fun than inventing things,” he said. “There were plenty of people doing lasers. The things I could do in origami—if I didn’t do them, they wouldn’t get done. Deciding to leave was a convergence of what I wanted to do plus what was happening at my company.” Given his personality—composed, moderate, painstaking—it seems like an unimaginably audacious move. A lot of people, throughout history, have walked away from respectable careers to become, say, poets or jazz musicians, but there are viable markets, albeit small and competitive, for those pursuits. Becoming a professional paper-folder is chancier, since there is still no established market for origami as a collectible art form, and, until recently, it was not much promoted as one: Yoshizawa published books of his designs but never sold any of his pieces. I wondered if Lang’s family wanted to kill him when they heard of his career plans. What he did, after all, is analogous to, perhaps, quitting a job as a neurosurgeon to take a shot at becoming a professional knitter. Diane has said that even though the transition seems as if it should have been scary, it wasn’t. His parents were also sanguine. They’d had a somewhat similar experience when Lang’s sister, who had been studying for a master’s in microbiology, left her field to become an interior designer. Lang’s mother, Carolyn, recalls, “I think I jokingly said, ‘Are you going to be able to feed your family?’ But I know Robert, and I knew he would have had it all planned.”

The first part of his plan was to write the book he’d been contemplating while still at JDS Uniphase—“Origami Design Secrets,” which was published in 2003 and lays out the underlying principles of origami and design techniques. He then set to work full time on designing new models and refining his old ones. In truth, Lang is not entirely out of the science world: he was just named the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Quantum Electronics, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and he does part-time laser consulting for Cypress Semiconductor. He has also had a number of origami assignments that are specifically scientific. Most are for products that need to fold and unfold in a predictable and compact way. He was commissioned to design a pouch for sterile medical instruments that could be opened without having a non-sterile surface touch any sterile surface, and a cell-phone antenna that had to fit inside the body of the phone. One medical manufacturing company hired him to figure out how to fold a heart implant—a mesh heart support designed for people with congestive heart failure—so that it was compact enough to be implanted via a skinny tube but, when released from the tube, would unfurl properly around the heart. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had him work on a similar folding problem, but this time the thing being folded was a telescope with a lens a hundred metres in diameter which had to be packed into a rocket so it could be sent into space.

Many of Lang’s commissions are less technical. He recently designed toilet-paper origami animals for a Febreze commercial, which were folded by a fellow origami artist, Linda Mihara, and last year, again assisted by Mihara, he created an origami world—forest, fields, deer, Victorian houses, a dragon—for a thirty-second Mitsubishi spot. He was hired to make a life-size Drew Carey for “The Drew Carey Show” and some airplane seats for the cover of Onboard, an aircraft-seating magazine, and to fold dollar bills into any shape he wanted (a birthday gift for a well-known fashion designer). He sells quite a few pieces to origami lovers—his most popular piece is a Hanji-paper bull moose, which is about nine inches tall and is available through his Web site for eight hundred dollars. Lang’s favorite commission was to fold an endangered Salt Creek tiger beetle for an entomologist who collects Salt Creek tiger beetle art. “For me, that commission was like manna from Heaven,” he said. “I’ll never be done with bugs.”

The laser cutter was growling away, scoring one of Lang’s Hanji sheets. He twiddled with his computer. On the screen was a lacy geometric pattern. Lang had designed it with software he started writing in 1990 called TreeMaker, which is well known in origami circles; it was the first software that would translate “tree” forms—that is, anything that sort of resembles a stick figure, such as people or bugs—into crease patterns. Another program he wrote, ReferenceFinder, converts the patterns into step-by-step folding instructions. This secured his position as the most technologically ambitious of the origami masters. In 2004, he was an artist-in-residence at M.I.T., and gave a now famous lecture about origami and its relationship to mathematical notions, like circle packing and tree theory. Brian Chan, a Ph.D. candidate in fluid dynamics at M.I.T., told me recently, “That was a huge lecture. It got everyone talking.” It inspired Chan to put his hobby of blacksmithing on hold and take up origami; he and Lang are now regular participants in an annual competition that is a friendly continuation of the Bug Wars. Last year’s theme was a sailing ship. Lang wasn’t happy with his entry—a sailboat with its sails down, revealing its skeletal masts—but talks enthusiastically about Chan’s. From a single sheet, Chan created a brig under full sail being attacked by a giant squid.

Something about origami’s simplicity and its apparently endless possibilities appeals to people. In 2003, the Mingei International Museum, in San Diego, mounted an exhibition called “Origami Masterworks,” which included several of Lang’s pieces. It was supposed to run six months, but attendance was so robust that the show was extended for six months, then for eight more. In Japan, the “Survivor”-style show “TV Champion” has often featured contestants engaging in extreme origami—folding with their hands in a box, or while balanced on stools with the paper suspended above them, or while snorkelling in a fishtank. A surprising number of countries have origami organizations; the Origami Society of the Netherlands has more than fifteen hundred members—probably the highest per-capita membership in the world. There is a soothing element in the monotony of folding and unfolding. In fact, origami as therapy has its proponents: in 1991, at the Conference on Origami in Education and Therapy, a mental-health professional presented a paper detailing her origami work with prisoners. “The most rewarding of experiences,” she wrote, “was that of observing the effect that Origami had on psychopathic killers.”

A few months ago, I went to a meeting of the Orange County offshoot of the West Coast Origami Guild, which is one of several groups near Los Angeles. (Its motto is “We fold under pressure.”) Lang was active in the group when he was at Caltech, and members talk about him in the most admiring tones, but with comfortable familiarity. One of the interesting things about origami is its egalitarianism—experts consort with hobbyists, and share the secrets of their work. The meeting was held in the craft room at the home of Carol Stevens, a tall, jolly woman who teaches paper arts in schools and senior centers; I had been sent directions to her house by a guild member who signed her e-mail “Merry Creasemas!” When I arrived, Carol was setting out refreshments. A few people were working from a book titled “Multimodular Origami Polyhedra: Archimedeans, Buckyballs, and Duality” (“We can fold them,” one of the folders said to another, “but we don’t know how to pronounce them”); another group was flipping through “Jewish Holiday Origami”; and a retired computer engineer named John Andrisan was creating a bra out of a dollar bill to illustrate a story he was telling about a lunch he once had at Hooters. At a back table, an older Japanese man was teaching four people how to make a twisted box. “Madam,” he chided one of the students, “you may know how to handle men, but you don’t know how to handle paper.” During a break, I asked the instructor how long he had been doing origami, and he said, “In 1986, I lost my son, I got divorced, my life . . .” He stopped and winced. “Origami was my savior.”

Lang believes that there is still much more to do in origami. “It’s like math,” he said to me one day, as we were having lunch at a burger joint near his studio. “It’s just out there waiting to be discovered. The exciting stuff is the stuff where you don’t even know how to begin.” He wants to improve his human figures, work with curved folding, and keep refining his insects. He wants to fold a better mousetrap and a better mouse. His primary interest is in the art of origami, but he has great faith in its expanding practical potential—solar sails, air bags, containers, shelters, medical implants. He had a recent message on his voice mail from someone who wanted to discuss using origami in the manufacture of plastics. We were about to leave the restaurant and head back to his studio. Before we left, I couldn’t help but ask him to do something pretty with his placemat. It was just a flimsy rectangle and had a few grease spots from his sandwich, but he flipped it and folded it and did some magic, and left the waitress with a perfect white boat.

“Saturday Night Live” is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was “down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars.” The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.” Even the national pastime was in danger. “But,” Gore added hopefully, “I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, ‘We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!’ ”

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate. The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his. But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq; the fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?

In increasing numbers, poll results imply, Americans are disheartened by the real and existing Presidency, and no small number also feel regret that Gore—the winner in 2000 of the popular vote by more than half a million ballots, the almost certain winner of any reasonable or consistent count in the state of Florida—ended up the target of what it is not an exaggeration to call a judicial coup d’état. Justice Antonin Scalia routinely instructs those who question his vote in Bush v. Gore to stop their ceaseless whinging. “It’s water over the deck,” he told an audience at Iona College last month. “Get over it.” But it is neither possible nor wise to “get over it.” The historical damage is too profound.

And yet, despite the burden of injury and injustice, Gore, more than any other major Democratic Party figure, including the many candidates assembled for next year’s Presidential nomination, has demonstrated in opposition precisely the quality of judgment that Bush has lacked in office. Gore’s critiques of the Administration’s rush to war in Iraq and of the deceptions used to justify it were early, brave, and correct. On the issue of climate change, of course, he has exercised visionary leadership. With humor and intelligence, and negligible self-pity, he dispensed with the temptations of political martyrdom and became a global Jeremiah. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, he waged what was at first a fairly lonely campaign to draw attention to the problem; now, as a popularizing propagandist, he has succeeded in registering it as a crisis with nearly everyone, from field-tripping schoolchildren to reality-dubious members of the Administration. With his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore made the undeniability of the crisis a matter of consensus; thanks largely to him, an environmental issue will be an electoral issue. His secular evangelism has earned him an honored night at the Academy Awards and—almost as glittering—a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

For the moment, Gore has absented himself from the 2008 Presidential race with a deliberately provisional explanation: He has no plans to be a candidate. He doesn’t expect to be a candidate. (Or, as he satirized his language for Jay Leno when talking about his future in the movies, “I just want to clarify: I have no plans to do a nude scene. I have no intention to do a nude scene. I don’t expect to do a nude scene. But I haven’t made a Shermanesque statement about it.”)

Gore’s reluctance is understandable. The balloting in Iowa and New Hampshire is nearly a year away. He is in no rush. He may have shared Bill Clinton’s love of policymaking but not his relish for full-immersion politicking. In the view of former aides still close to him, Gore can’t lose by staying on the electoral sidelines. While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama start competing––warily at first, and then, inevitably, taking direct aim at one another’s weaknesses––Gore can stand unbruised, nursing the lingering glamour of his popular margin in 2000 and, perhaps, demanding by quiet inference that we take stock of a distinguished public career that began three decades ago, when Gore was a twenty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran freshly elected to Congress.

If only to take an honest man’s word for it, Gore’s entry into the race is unlikely. Clinton, Obama, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd—the field already provides a pool of talent and a range of possibilities infinitely more encouraging than the status quo. Moreover, the nomination and election of any one of the first three would take America a long way toward keeping the unfulfilled promise of “We the people”—not least because the appeal of all three is based only incidentally upon gender, race, or ethnic heritage.

If the next few months produce an obvious and relatively intact nominee, fine. Gore can stay active in his new role, and perhaps carry that role further, as a kind of climate czar in a Democratic Administration. But, as someone once said, stuff happens. The campaign may get nasty quickly. Clinton’s Iraq position may prove untenable in any of its iterations. Obama’s youthful charisma may look like inexperience after prolonged exposure to electoral gamesmanship. David Geffen might grow claws. A year is a very long time in politics, especially in the circular shooting contests that the Democrats so often convene.

There will still be Gore, patient and untrammelled. In any case, he will not have embarrassed himself. Post-lock-box, he has developed a keener sense of that. When the writers at “Saturday Night Live” suggested that he take part in a sketch featuring some scatological themes, Gore demurred with a combination of ironic self-preservation and his customary good judgment. “I’m sure this is funny,” he said, “but at the end of this I want to have some bread crumbs left leading back to my dignity.”