by James Jones
“Well, that’s Socratic, ain’t it?” Dave said, unable not to grin.
Bob merely smiled. “And why does he feel he is worthy of appreciation?”
“Because he thinks he is a nice person, of course.”
“Would you not say he loved himself?”
“No! I wouldn’t say that,” Dave said. “Maybe he hates himself.”
“If he thinks he is a nice person?”
“Maybe he both loves and hates himself. Maybe he hates himself because he does love himself.”
“Very good,” Bob smiled, his eyes twinkling with pleasure. “And quite true. Nevertheless, he does love himself? Even if he hates himself for it?”
“All right. Yes,” Dave said.
“You have no other choice,” Bob smiled. “Now: Why does a person fall in love?”
Dave shrugged. “Because he wants someone else to love him as much as he loves himself.” He had, in fact, known it all his life. But it was a different thing to admit it to an innocent bystander.
“And why does he want someone to love him as much as he loves himself?”
“Reassurance?” Dave said. “Vanity? Anyway, because he needs for somebody else to believe it, too.”
“Of course. And why does he need for someone else to believe it?”
Dave shrugged again. “Obviously, because he wants to prove to himself his love for himself is valid.”
Bob nodded, smiling. “So that, as you said, he will not have to hate himself any more for loving himself.”
“Maybe so,” Dave said irritably, “maybe so.”
“Yes?” Bob smiled. “Or no?”
“Yes.”
“Well? You have your answer, don’t you? Why does man fall in love?”
“Because he loves himself,” Dave said defeatedly.
“And because he hopes to make someone else love him as much as he loves himself.”
“I’d hate to believe that,” Dave said vehemently.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Bob smiled paternally. “You just proved it yourself, didn’t you? Why not believe it?”
“Because I don’t like to think people are that bad.”
“Bad? Who said anything about bad?” Bob smiled.
“I want to believe people are good!” Dave cried. “I do believe people are good!”
“It is you who are making the distinction between good and bad, not I, dear Dave,” Bob smiled. “You, of all people, who in your own book are exposing the hearts of people as it is only rarely done, you who are exposing the human condition of war and combat for what it really is—you dare to make a distinction between good and bad?”
“But what about all the people who died? What about the spiritual level? What about all those other people: the Resistance leaders, and the simple unpolitical people who wouldn’t knuckle under, what about the innocent Jews and Germans who died under torture by the Nazis? What about them?”
“You put this on the spiritual level?” Bob said. “I think it belongs on the mental level, don’t you?”
“How so? No, sir! You’re caught there. You’ve defeated your own argument there.”
Bob smiled again. “Very well. You ask me about all those who died under torture at the hands of the Nazis? Then I must ask you about all the Nazis who died under torture at the hands of the Russians; what of them?”
“But they were wrong!”
“Are the Russians not wrong?”
“Yes,” Dave said, collapsing inwardly. “Yes; they are wrong.”
“And I must ask you also about all the Americans who died under torture at the hands of other Americans—at our own Redeployment Centers? Are they not also wrong?”
“Yes,” Dave said quietly.
“But have we punished them? We have not.” He paused a moment and shook his head gently. “I fear you are not thinking straight, dear Dave. I fear you are letting your emotions get the better of your judgment.”
“Yes,” Dave said. “Yes, of course, you’re quite right.”
“And as for all these people who have died under torture, are they good simply because they believed as they did? Of course not. Or are they good simply because they were tortured? If so, then all any of us need to do in order to be good is to be tortured by someone else. No, I think you must put all this back down on the mental level; and if so, we come back to our original proposition: Why? Why did these people do as they did? Why were they heroic?
“Let me ask you? the men you fought with, why did they fight as heroically as they did? Can you answer?”
“I—” Dave said, and then paused. “Yes, I guess I can.”
“Truthfully? Out of your own experience only? Why, then?”
Dave shook his head. “As you said: self-love. They wanted to be admired, and respected—”
“Even loved?”
“Even loved, by the other humans they lived with.”
Bob shook his head gently. “Then, there is your answer to the others—the Resistance leaders, the Russians, the Nazis, the Americans. They all did what they did for the very same reason. Self-love, the separate, self-conscious, self-awareness of self-love that man exists in on the mental plane.”
“All right,” Dave said; “I agree. But what is the spiritual level? Where does it come in?”
But before Bob could answer, he interrupted himself. “You know, if I were a logician,” he grinned, “I could tear your argument to shreds.”
“Of course,” Bob smiled; “but you and I are not logicians. We are intuitionists. We are creative men. A poet and a novelist. Where would we be if we tried to work by pure logic.”
“All right,” Dave said feeling unaccountably depressed. “All right. What about the spiritual level? Where does it fit into this? Why does man fall in love on the spiritual level? Or rather: Why on the spiritual level does man fall in love?”
Bob smiled and shook his head. “I can give you a simple answer. But you already know that yourself. And to attempt to do any more than that would be to enter upon such an incredible complexity that we would literally be talking for weeks. You’re asking me about a wholly different field, a subject I’ve spent years reading and musing about—and still know practically next to nothing of. We would have to leave our so-called philosophy and enter into metaphysics, a subject where two minds who do not already agree could argue and speculate forever. I have no way of telling you how incredibly complex the subject is. Suffice it to say,” Bob smiled in his gentle way, “that there appears to be—from what small bit I have been able to assimilate, at any rate—a whole entire world of bodyless souls, spirits, complete with its own hierarchy of Leaders and Lords and Masters—minor Gods; Demi-Gods, if you will—surrounding the material world we inhabit; in—in another dimension, so to speak; and which is infinitely more complex than the world we ourselves live in. And you know how complex that is! It would be foolish to attempt to explain any more. Except to add, that this is only a very small part of the inhabited Universe, and that these people are apparently in constant contact with some parts of our minds, without our knowledge of course, guiding us; beneficently, not malignantly.”
“That’s pretty hard to believe,” Dave said, a little breathlessly.
“Naturally,” Bob smiled. “I’m not at all sure I believe it at all. I’m only telling you what I’ve garnered out of a number of years of reading on the subject.”
“Have you ever had any contacts with this—other world?” Dave said.
“None at all. Never once in my life have I even had what might even remotely be called an ‘occult’ experience. Though I have often wished,” he smiled sadly, “that I might have had; at least it would be a proof to me. But you must understand that so-called ‘occult’ experiences are a very, very low level manifestation of these spiritual phenomena. That’s what almost all of your so-called ‘mediumistic’ accounts and the common reincarnation experiences consist of. It is a mistake to believe that just because a person dies and enters the astral world, he has a greater
intelligence or a deeper soul than he had when alive. Actually, he is very little different from what he was when alive—and probably won’t be, for a number of other lives.”
“And you really believe in all this?” Dave said.
Bob stared at him a moment, smiling, then after a second gave his almost imperceptible shrug. “That is what all of these books teach. Most of the books disagree between themselves in the minor details—which,” he added, “is certainly understandable considering the incredible complexity of it all. All I do know is that I believe in metempsychosis—in reincarnation, rather—as the evolution of individual souls. But I cannot even prove that to you.”
“Well—” Dave said. “Well—” This was getting a long way away from the subject of “falling in love.” “Well, what about that simple answer you said I already knew? Maybe I don’t know it after all?”
Bob he raised one corded-veined hand and ran it back and forth over his close-cropped head, and then brought it down and smoothed back his big mustache, and stared at Dave for a moment, smiling gently, out of his wise, old face.
“About your simple answer—which I am quite sure you already know: If one can assume that man is evolving—which I think we may more or less safely assume, for our purpose at least—that man is evolving; is growing; then let us ask how he grows.”
“How?” Dave asked.
Bob nodded. “What is the one cardinal phenomenon by which he grows?”
“I’m lost,” Dave said. “You’ve lost me.”
Bob smiled. “A hint, then. The classic worn example: The child who although he has been told not to, puts his hand on the hot stove.”
Dave stared at him, feeling totally ridiculous now, and also for some reason a little scared. “Pain,” he said. “Suffering.”
“Pain. There never has been, and never will be—contrary to what we humans would like to believe—any growth or any learning, without pain. Pain the great Destroyer, and the great Healer.” Bob smiled. “I think if we ‘humans’ should give thanks to God for any single thing at all, we should do so first for our God-given ability to suffer pain.”
“That sounds like some sort of new cult of masochism,” Dave said.
Bob grinned. “Perhaps it should be! A new Beatitude!” he smiled. “Blessed are the Masochists for they shall be the heirs of the Sadists.
“Well, there you have your simple answer: Which, as I said, you already know in your heart. You asked why on the spiritual level does man fall in love: I should say that because only there, in the self-sealed self-love that man lives in on the mental plane, can the only truly shell-breaking, crust-dissolving pain be found.”
“But that’s a plain paradox,” Dave protested.
Bob smiled and spread his corded-veined hands. “Of course? What is not? Is it not also a paradox that in our efforts to escape pain we all run immediately for salvation to human love where we find the greatest pain of all? Perhaps Old Plato was not so wrong after all, with his idea that male and female once inhabited the same body, and have ever since spent their lives frantically trying to find their Other Self. Today we prefer to look on this statement of his as an amusing, rather sly, symbolism; but perhaps—” he smiled, “he was actually, factually correct.”
Dave was rubbing his hand over his jaw, which he had neglected to shave today. “Well, you’ve solved my technical problem, anyway, Bob. In order to make my love affair believable—if I decided to write it in, of course—all I have to do is show that my GI and my French girl—or any other two lovers in the world—are just simply both plain blind fools.”
“Of course,” Bob smiled. “Handle it just the same way you would handle your heroes, and your soldiers, and your warfare. I have a book inside in the house that explains it all very well. It’s written by a man—a Master—who calls himself simply ‘the Tibetan.’ The way he explains it is that it’s all a problem of Glamours. Everything in the world is a Glamour. Because, after all, the world doesn’t really exist. War is a Glamour. Politics is another Glamour. Religion, as man knows it, is another Glamour. So the problem really resolves itself into one of simply getting rid of all one’s Glamours. And love—love is probably the greatest Glamour of them all.
“It’s really all very simple,” he smiled.
“Yeh,” Dave said. He got up off the stool. For some reason, he wanted, or needed, or felt it was proper to shake hands with Bob, and he held out his hand. Bob French grasped it warmly, smiling.
“I’ll go in and get it for you if you’d like,” he offered.
“No,” Dave said. “No, not now. Right now I’ve got a whole hell of a lot more than I can digest. Perhaps some other time.”
Bob smiled. “You know,” he added, “I have a little theory that I’ve been sort of developing over the last few years, in connection with reincarnation, that the true artist—whose work I have always held to be the greatest endeavor of man—is really only the last evolutionary stage the individual soul goes through, before it becomes, as the ‘occult’ books call them: the beginning Disciple, working specifically with some Great Master; and that all the suffering artists like you and I go through—all our great vanity and our oversexualization (which cause us much pain)—all these are both a sort of testing ground for us and also the very means by which we learn to sluff off those Glamours which we must get rid of in order to become a lowly Disciple.
“It’s rather a comforting thought,” he smiled; “and also a very humbling one. I figure it will take me about three to ten lives—depending on my various Karma—to become a truly great enough artist to be able to make the crossover.”
“You think so, hunh?” Dave said with a weak grin. “Jesus Christ! then where does that put me?”
“Ah! but one never knows,” Bob smiled. “You may be far ahead of me. In fact, considering the work you’re doing lately, I suspect that you are.”
“Say, you know,” Dave said suddenly, “I’ve got a friend I’d like for you to meet. He thinks a very great deal like you do, though of course he can’t say it as well. It’s ’Bama Dillert; the gambler I buddy around with. What you’ve been saying about Glamours made me think of him.”
“Well, by all means bring him over,” Bob said.
“Well, it’s not that simple. I’ve been trying to get him to come over with me for six months. But he’s shy.”
“Good Heavens!” Bob exclaimed; “surely he’s not shy of someone like Gwen and myself.”
“Well, he thinks you’re both intellectuals, you know?”
“Great Scott!” Bob grinned. “What have I ever done to him that he should insult me so?”
Dave laughed. “Well, maybe I can drag him over sometime. He really does think an awful lot like you do. In fact, he reads a number of occult books himself.”
“I should very much like to meet him,” Bob said in his exquisitely polite way.
“Well, we’ll see,” Dave said. “I’ll see you, Bob.”
“Dave,” Bob said gently. The younger man stopped at the door of the shop. “Why don’t you just go on in the house and wait? Gwen should be home at any moment—if she isn’t here already. Go ahead,” he smiled. “Make yourself at home, if she isn’t here yet.”
“Well,” Dave said. “All right.”
And so that was what he did. He crossed the snow-covered yard, and in the house he put some of Bob’s classical records on the player and got himself a can of beer and just wandered around looking at some of the books on the walls, as he had done so many times before. He still could not tell just how far below the surface of all this Bob French could see. Had Bob merely invited him to go on in out of innocence? Or had he done it because he was aware of everything, and just didn’t care? Maybe he had done it to deliberately show Dave that he was aware, and that he didn’t care? All that occultism stuff was on Dave’s mind, too. Evidently, Bob did really seriously believe in the reincarnation of souls; and the fact that he did shook Dave. A man like that, with the real mind he had. For him to believe that stuff
— When Gwen came home from school in a little while, he had already drunk three cans of beer, and they went for another ride out through the forbidding hard-frozen, winter Illinois landscape. As they drove along, he told her about the discussion with Bob, and asked her about it.
“Does he really believe in reincarnation?”
“Oh yes,” Gwen said. “We’ve had a lot of discussions about it.”
“Do you believe in it, too?”
“Yes, I think I do,” she said. “I don’t know of course that it’s a fact; but of all the different systems of religion, and so-called life after death, reincarnation seems to me the only really logical answer to the problems of the soul.”
“Logical!” Dave exclaimed.
“Yes. Logical. After all, what could be more illogical than what the various forms of Christianity teach: That an individual soul is created every time a child is born; and that then, when it dies after a span of sixty or seventy years, it is judged for all eternity by what it did or did not do during those few years. To me that’s simply ridiculous. It’s unjust on the part of God in the first place, and in the second place, it’s simply wasteful. Think how many new souls that takes every day! Heavens, God would be so busy making new human souls that He wouldn’t have time to create new galaxies or solar systems or other life forms or anything else. And all just so they could live some sixty or seventy years in order to be judged. No; I think it’s all just our incredible human vanity, which makes it impossible for us to believe that our ‘I’ could ever be used again by some other personality.
“It just seems the most logical hypothesis. Why should souls not also evolve? since everything else does? And if I am to believe in God at all, I must be able to believe He is just.”
“Sure,” Dave said; “me, too. But that’s no proof. God may very easily be unjust, for all we know. Maybe God’s idea of justice and ours don’t necessarily coincide.”
“Probably they don’t,” Gwen said. “I didn’t mean that God must be just by human terms. I meant He must be just by His own terms; since those are the only terms there are, He therefore must be.”