 Part 1 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Llewellyn Poeus Confessions by John Cooper, section 1 It is the little thing, the unrehearsed gesture, the catch in the breath, the droop of the lip, the start of surprise, which rarely reveals. We may analyse ourselves in volumes and remain undiscovered, and then by a yawn, a tilt of the head, a sob of exhaustion, a flash of hate, we are betrayed and unmasked forever. It came over me yesterday that the whole secret of my being, of my happiness and my misery, was to be discovered in my hands. I speak as a biologist, not as a palmist. Under ordinary conditions, my consciousness does not penetrate to my hands. These curious, human appendages remain inert, clumsy, helpless, heavy, dead. I have dead hands, the hands of a dead person. I cannot do the simplest thing with my hands, without a definite and concentrated effort of will. It is like working with clumsy tools, tools that require elaborate direction every time. I cannot tie my shoestrings or post a letter, or lie to match, without issuing a special mandate to my incorrigible hands. This is why they are always knocking over things and dropping things and tearing things. They are out of reach of the electricity of my being. My consciousness does not penetrate to where they hang, swinging so helplessly at the end of my arms. When I am lecturing, however, and this irritates my profoundest pride, for I despise a lecturing animal. My hands change completely and my consciousness flows through them to the tips of my fingers that become sensitive then, abnormally sensitive. I feel as I speak, and between them and the waves of my thought there is a direct magnetic connection. Under ordinary conditions, my hands are the hands of a dead body. When I am lecturing, they are the hands of a lover, of a lover caressing his darling. Is that not a curious thing, a little thing? But more suggestive than much analysis. The general public is certainly not any darling of mine. And yet, when under the spell of addressing it, my fingers become the fingers of a lover. This does not mean that my emotions are kind. The emotions of lovers are not always kind. In reading what follows the reader must be on the lookout for indirect betrayals and unmaskings. He must follow me suspiciously, guardedly, furtively. He must be prepared for that invincible human trick of using language to conceal rather than to reveal. I am ready to confess myself. My mind may be ready to throw myself into the water, but once in the water, the instinct of self-preservation compels him to swim. So I swim, onwards, unless the reader's imagination is shrewdly alert to thrust me down into the truth. I should like to indicate here my recognition, deeper than they believe, of the sublime patience of those who have suffered from me. I make the signal as it were out of thick darkness, for in spite of the subtlety upon which I pride myself, I feel vaguely conscious that I've been dull and blind in certain relations as a twisted seashell choked up with sand. The more one tries to analyze oneself, the more one is conscious of amazing paradoxes and inconsistencies which lurk under the simplest surface. I think, as compared with most, I'm strangely simple in my dominant tendencies. It is because of the simplicity that a certain duality in me becomes so disconcerting. I fancy sometimes that my exterior appearance gives an impression of power and formidableness that is altogether misleading. Below this Roman despot look I conceal frequently a weakness that's shrinking, a timidity, an exhaustion of energy, a psychic disintegration of personality, natural rather to a slave than a master. The only person, as far as I know, who has really come to believe in this abandoned weakness concealed under the mask of domination is the admirable young painter Raymond Johnson, who in his mad picture of me, and needs a post-impressionist to find out these things, has compelled my material likeness to indicate the bewildered exhaustion of my soul. Perhaps it is because I have the soul of a slave that the great personalities upon whose creations I lecture have selected me among the rest as the most submissive medium for their revelations. Certainly they have a way of obsessing me as if they were so many demons. There will be no struck here and there in what follows which will of necessity irritate and annoy many. I do not regret that I cannot. In a profound and indescribable manner, I feel that these things, these moods of almost vindictive rebelliousness, find their place in their justification in some underlying duality beyond the confines of rational logic. Criticism, protest, the will to destruction, even when exercised in frenzied helplessness against forces that cannot be destroyed, find their place in the world economy. The anger of the worm turning upon the universe may, in a larger synthesis, be nothing but the anger of one God with another God. And who can tell how unnecessary to the purpose of life are the quarrels of these immortals? I have tried to indicate in what follows my most permanent reactions to the world, but the reader of these pages must remember that the river is flowing even while we are pushing it, and while there is life, there must be change. I long to be an epicurean, but something always drives me on out of my pleasant cloister. I notice as a curious fact that many of the impulses that thus drive me forward are my own maddest obsessions, and yet in the violence of such pursuits I stumble upon seashores flooded with moonlight and am rewarded for obeying demons by encountering divinities. End of Part 1 Part 2 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poece and Llewellyn Poece. Confessions by John Cooper. Section 2 I do not think that anyone who has never tried the experiment of making a word portrait of himself can possibly understand its difficulty to achieve it with any success. One needs one of two things, either an absolute and even ridiculous shamelessness or a calm and perturbable psychological insight. The first of these requisites was possessed by the admirable peeps, and in a less degree by Casanova and Rousseau, the second was possessed by Goethe, whose truth and poetry out of my life is a masterpiece of analytical statement. The method used by Montaigne and his egotistic soliloquies is really a mixture of these two, with an added literary and epicurean unction, his peculiar temperament supplied. But in all these instances and in many others of less famous reputation, we are conscious of one common element, at once the motive force and the lifeblood of such an enterprise. I am speaking of a certain definite attitude of the person, thus confessing himself towards the self he is describing. The nature of this attitude I can best indicate by calling it a sympathetic interest in oneself. This sympathetic interest we find in all the famous confessions from that of Saint Augustine to that of Oscar Wilde, nor with the help of it need the humblest autobiography lack importance. My own feeling is that any single person who ever lived worried the stupidest on earth are profoundly provocative things about himself if only the necessary words could be conveyed to his intelligence. I am not the stupidest on earth, though doubtless compared with these great ones my intellect is blundering enough and my senses sufficiently dull. But were I the aparchy of human incompetence there would still I maintain, be an immense interest available if I could find the words to hit the exact emotions and feelings which make me what I am. It is an insult to common human nature this mock modest Philistine notion that it is indiscreet and indecent for an ordinary person to attempt to give expression to his secret identity. It is really no more than a form of silly and vulgar pride to be so cautiously reserved. It is evidence of a touchy uneasy sense that if one did describe oneself one would betray oneself and shuffle off the pompous hypocritical mask with which one covers up one's foolishness. The reserve which I am speaking is one of the most contemptible qualities of our English and American race. It is on a par with our fussy self-conscious and grotesque dignity. A dignity which is only a parody upon the real virtue indicated by that beautiful word. The natural instinctive movements of Arabs or Latins or Indians never really make them ridiculous. It is we who make ourselves ridiculous by our stiff jerky's bismotic awkwardness. Reserve and social relations has undoubtedly its place. What could surpass the reserve of the Oriental? But when an attempt is made to carry this social weapon into the sphere of literature and art the result is only a general paralysis. It is, after all, as Goethe says the personal which interests us. The attempt to substitute for the personal any degree of scholarship or erudition is fatal to genuine interest both in art and criticism. There is a very widely spread view current in educational circles that what we call introspection is a dangerous and immoral thing a thing from which our youths and maidens ought to be protected. Let them look out upon the world. Such pedants protest. What have they to do with analyzing and dissecting their own minds? Let them study the works of God and cultivate their bodies and be sensible and happy. This is all part of that unfortunate modern craze for what is called being healthy-minded. Introspection and analysis are supposed to be prerogative of degenerate natures of natures that spend their time in useless brooding because they are inefficient in action. It is a grotesque mistake. We cannot read that Socrates was less courageous because he had the habit of falling into introspective trances nor does it at all appear that in the present war all adhering and efficiency is monopolized by the healthy-minded. It is indeed by reason of this deplorable prejudice in favor of reserve. In this ridiculous view that unreserved people are conceited and degenerate that so little progress is made towards an intelligent understanding by man of his relations to himself. The most entirely reserved person that one has met call him up in your mind-treater will probably be found to be the most conceited person one has met, and the most opposed to every kind of illumination. The fear of self-analysis is a cowardly fear and suggests in the persons who betray it that they have instincts and proclivities of which they are thoroughly afraid and still more afraid of letting anyone else have the least suspicion. There is, of course, a quite different type of reserved person and a very sinister one. I mean the crafty, worldly-minded, predatory scoundrel who habitually wears a mask and keeps his thoughts to himself based narrow, greedy thoughts. A person of this kind is not conceited or unintelligent. He is only too clever. He plays up to the prejudices of the public and the moral hypocrisy of the preachers with the most true calculation. He despises the naive loquacity of unreserved artists and philosophers. He holds them as simple fools in place of quietly plundering the public and enjoying their little vices under the cloak of respectability. Must needs go babbling forth into the street and shouting out their secret for the warning of all men. Such and one has no time to regard his emotional or intellectual nature with sympathetic interest. His pleasure is derived from the inward, satiric glee with which he watches the stupidity of the sheep-like crowd as he shares them to the skin. A person like this is not necessarily a wonderful, Napoleonic, blond beast. He is often more than a little stupid and when thrown off the track of his economic depredations will look like a plain fallen conversation with an intelligent man. On such occasions his carefully cultivated reserve sometimes breaks down and he gives vent to little barbarous absurdities full of entertainment for the ironic observer. Entertainment one would no doubt derive from any observations such and one might be betrayed into making about this very sketch. Whereas a wise arascal would only chuckle to himself under his beard because one more enemy of his class was giving himself away and incurring the malevolence of the mob. To write successful confessions one must regard oneself with sympathetic interest. This is my own statement but I emphasise it again for a very important reason. As a matter of fact hardly any human being could be found possessed of average intelligent for whom the successful writing and confessions would be harder than it is to me. For I do not regard myself with sympathetic interest. This is indeed one of my most curious and personal characteristics. I use the expression successful confessions deliberately for I am fully aware of the ease and fluency. Perhaps the two great ease and fluency with which I can write some sort of confessional sketch by successful confessions however I mean the turning of one's poor portrait of oneself into a true and permanent work of art and it is that from which I fear I am fatally debarred by my total lack of sympathetic interest in myself. It will be found I believe if one reverts once more to the famous writers who have been successful in this branch of literature that they all regard themselves with enormous sympathy. This sympathy may take the form of imaginative interest or it may take the form of vivid dramatic self-consciousness or it may take the form of tender sentimental pity or it may take the form of humorous depreciation. In every case however there is present a certain caressing tone of love and attraction in their attitude towards themselves. They love themselves well in spite of all the derogatory things they say and out of this love they create winning and provocative works of art. I can almost conceive it possible for a person who hated himself to make an attractive though sinister portrait out of his detestation but I really am normal in this neither love myself nor hate myself. The queer thing about it is that I am a tremendous and incongruable egoist. I am pliable and unselfish in little things but in main issues my self assertion is monstrous. How then can it happen that I who assert myself so vigorously have no sympathetic interest in myself? I think the explanation or one of the explanations can be found in the fact that I pursue sensations so obstinately that I have lost all power of interesting myself in that thread of continuous consciousness which in our inmost being binds our sensations together. Sensations are continually taking me out of myself and away from myself. In sensations I forget myself and if I do not forget myself there would be so much less interest left in me to devote to sensations. I am too much of a pleasure seeker to care to stop and brood over my own being though half the pleasure of my life is in brooding over the beings of those I love the great artists and writers. It would be different if I loved myself then no doubt I should be criticising and analysing myself continually with passionate pleasure. Am I perhaps the very acme and apogee of a born critic? I have been led before now into such a conceit and even at this moment I do not regard it as an outrageous claim. I have this double advantage as a critic my mind is singularly clear fluid and nimble my sensations are singularly detached chaotic and unclassified I can therefore flow with protein agility into the minds and temperaments of others I can become others and feel myself into their most recondite feelings and I can do this with passionate pleasure and excitement because I love others while I do not love myself. So many would be criticised bad from being interesting and thrilling in their discoveries because they drag with them wherever they go their devotion to themselves and their own ideas. I am free of this burden because I have no devotion to myself and no ideas of my own. Side by side with this clear transparent unclouded flexible mind I have a great many strong and tenacious sensual prejudices. It is necessary to have these in order to write interesting and exciting criticism for criticism is nothing if it is not extremely personal in my criticism I am at once abnormally impersonal and abnormally personal and that is why I may turn out to assume my old conceit to be one of the best critics in the world my impersonality springs from my complete lack of convictions opinions, principles or any system my personality springs from the inveterate obstinacy of my sensational prejudices and from the curious absence among them of any connecting imaginative link I am in fact as a critic naturally objective and naturally subjective Objective because I become with unclouded fluid preciseness exactly what my author is subjective because my separate sensations so completely occupy and obsess me it would be true to say that I live in a very narrow sense a double life I live in my mind which is eternally restless mobile and light as air and in my sensations which are heavily weighted and earthbound and obstinately unchanging it is no fantastic abuse of language to say that my sensations are chaotic for though they are so fixed and indelible they are not in any way connected with one another they have no intelligent continuity no symbolic orientation they are not fused or moulded by any shaping imagination mental detachment and sensual detachment that is the form my life takes and that form is a cul-de-sac an impasse when it comes to any question of improvement or growth my sensations cannot grow because they have no living principle of life in them no imaginative vision no emotional concentration my mind cannot grow because like a floating film of white mist takes shape and colour from every single one of the peaks and promontories which it passes in its erratic wayfaring I present therefore the appearance of the most sceptical as well as the most obstinance of men and this appearance coincides with the reality my life is made up of the passive reception of alien ideas and the passive assertion of inalienable prejudices I believe everything and nothing and I pass from sensation to sensation like a moth from bush to bush End of Part 2 Part 3 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poice and Llewellyn Poice Confessions by John Cooper Section 3 I said I have no ideas of my own and I have none but the reader must not think me inconsistent if all the way through the following page as he comes continually upon references to fate the impression of fate is not an idea it is a fact it is an inevitable human category it is understood by instinct and propitiated by superstition it is like the year we breathe and the ether which surrounds us it is impossible to escape from it it is the great truism the eternal axiom it is the thing originally given the primal stuff of all our experiences every philosophy, every system every idea has its main difficulty the problem of dealing with fate a belief in fate is neither a philosophy nor a system it is a necessity but though this is true of the impression of fate I may perhaps go so far as to admit that the peculiar quality of my mind its colourless receptivity lends itself in a special sense to an understanding of fate's implications an unconquerable skepticism in the sphere of every explanation of this fact tends to throw the fact itself into forlorn prominence I may also admit that my predilection for what is chaotic and disconnected for what is arbitrary, perverse and exceptional springs in like manner from the irrational and incalculable nature of my detached sensations from what I have just said in the mere saying it chills me with the shadow of myself it is perhaps made a little more clear how difficult it is for me to paint a vivid portrait of such a subject I am not in myself an attractive subject though the impetus and magic with which I can interpret the attraction of others is so prevailing that many, in coming to know me as I really am must suffer serious disappointment it is not only strangers and such gentle unknown sympathisers this may be led to read my writings who are thus disappointed it has been my ill luck to lead into devastating disillusions some of the most charming friends I've ever had they too have judged me by the swift protein transformations by which I have the power of assuming the very tone and temper of the writers I love they too have been interested and arrested by the significant intensity of their original sensations they too have looked anxiously for the imaginative vision that should give these sensations coherence but such a vision, such a coherence has never appeared and they have been thrown weirly back upon the spectacle of an insane sensationalist pacing like an imprisoned tiger round and round the same cage and of an insane skeptic using all identity and personality and substance and eerie diffusions into empty space it is impossible for me to blame the faithful friends who thus provoked and tantalised beyond endurance turn and rend me with bitter speeches I sympathise with them and not with myself I love them and not myself and yet the crafty abjuracy of their cursed thing I am grins patiently at their indignation smirks an ironic assent to all they say and shuffles off to behave as badly as ever in one very curious point I have absolutely deceived many simple people I have the power of suggesting the existence of abysmal gulfs of wickedness in a deep and terrible soul I am led sometimes almost to the verge of self-deception in this matter even now I confess I cannot quite explain how it is that certain of my emotions which I feel are really on the surface and purely a matter of that borderland between the brain and the nerves which we call the psychic region should seek to present themselves to me as if they are prose from unfathomable depths and were, as they say, inspired It must be due to a self-deception of this kind that the idea of the devil first took possession of man's imagination I have been ridiculously tempted now and again to assume the Luciferian cloak and stride forth as a kind of poetic manfred ravaged by scurry-act scars How much more exciting I could make this quiet sketch if I gave way to these promptings and indulged in hints and suggestions of dark evil-proof fundities and myself of which I was the Satanic victim But I am too skeptical for this and my mind is too clear Ah, how a vain and fauna show all such phylogenous hallucinations in the presence of the marble continents of eternal fate I know well enough that my darkest most antisocial instincts are nothing but the pure material accidents of some pre-natal jolts and agitations of some trifling pathological chance of birth and inheritance It is when the imagination invades the mind that it is able to play such pranks and build up its elaborate metaphysical illusions out of what a pure material twists and warps My imagination is as completely detached from my mind as my mind is detached from my senses That is one of the reasons why I find myself so unlovable and unattractive I am, as it were, a loosely tied knot of sense and mind and fancy and the resultant fabric is too unravelled to be agreeable to handle My imagination could play me if my sceptical reason were not so detached from it All manner of quaint tricks Led by it, I could enlarge upon certain of my inherent vices until all my life, off the immediate track of these dangerous obsessions became like a drunkard sober interludes, dull, colourless and lethargic It could persuade me to take possession of some one particular vice a mere accident of birth and thrust it with awe and terror into dark, mysterious caverns of primeval being until it became like the smoke of hell It could provoke me to turn some accidental perversity into a great spiritual tornado of evil making a desolation of all it touched It could easily do any of these things and it has come near to doing them when, for some cause, my wandering, irresponsible mind has deserted its post but it never has really done them It never has really had its way with me because my obstinate, incoherent senses and my eerie, flawed reason are very difficult things to dominate I sometimes feel as if I were a dead body galvanised temporarily into performing the necessary functions of existence but only inspired with real, passionate life when some great spirit from the past some epicurus or spinosa or Goethe touches me with his magic It is an odd thing this feeling of deadness, of heavy material inertia It is combined in my case with the teasing pricks of thousand annoying thoughts thoughts of practical difficulties of hypochondriacal apprehensions of social antipathies and it weighs upon me for hours together more heavily than my harassed stomach It is not only the great souls from the past who can cry aloud to the scurps that is I who rise up and walk I can be drawn back to life by the vivifying presence of any brave and joyous companion Given the society of one person that I know my second self, my brother in the Lord and I could pass an eternity of earthly days without ever falling back into myself He would feel for me, he would laugh for me, he would cry for me and with him I should become a natural living person full of buoyancy and friendly grace With him by my side, life would become to me like the perpetual reading of an exquisite book Some unending Marius the Epicurian or Jean Christophe the pages of which I should turn every day with new delight and wonder Perhaps my peculiar disposition is one that was really intended by nature to be so accompanied Perhaps, shorn of this solace, I rarely moved through this world atrophied and stunted, incurred and paralysed Perhaps it is the want of this alter ego of this twin soul that makes me so wearily away from normal humanity and grows so dull and morose Perhaps it is the want of him that lends to my little, absurd vices their obsessing quality, their preoccupying importance I know well enough that when I am with him, my vice is there is nothing It is difficult for me to write this brief dissection of the body of my thought It would be far more difficult for me to attempt anything of an autobiographical nature I cannot bear to recall my childhood and those memories of youth which bring tears of sentimental self-love to the eyes of the most hardened, fill me with nothing but a cold repulsion My past self, at any remote epoch, seems so unpleasantly like my present self that I loathe to think of it In fact, in many respects, I prefer my present self to these clumsy caricatures these shuffled premonitions By long practice, I have learned the art of escaping from myself After blunderings and absurd experiments I have discovered what particular authors and artists and people and places are best adapted to save me from myself My whole life has been one long running away and years have given me swiftness and agility I am now such an adept at self-forgetfulness that I might almost claim to be able to jump over my own shadow I should not be giving an absolutely faithful sketch of what I am if I did not allude to a certain quaint and strange phenomena which sometimes confuses me by its appearance I allude to the phenomena of possession If any man has been the victim of this ancient experience, it is surely I I am sometimes, it would seem, literally possessed Now, it must be understood that I do not for a moment believe in any supernatural object corresponding to these experiences I believe them to be entirely explicable on purely material grounds But I should be false to myself if I did not confess that when they appear, they appear accompanied by the illusion of spiritual reality I have suffered at different times from the presumption of three distinct positions Under the influence of one, I become insatiably wicked and have the illusion of wickedness as a thing of infinite horizons and possibilities My sceptical reason mocks at this formidable nonsense and hints satirically that the whole thing is due to some trifling chance of prenatal warping Under the influence of another, I become preternaturally noble and have the illusion of goodness as a thing of infinite horizons and possibilities My sceptical reason mocks at this too and points to the atavistic presence of some blind race instinct which would feign submerge the selfishness of the individual in the loftier selfishness of the tribe Lastly and most curious of all I have splendid and transcendental possession under the influence of which I feel conscious of an invincible courage and an unconquerable contempt a courage ready to look, all accidents, all chants, all circumstances in the face with calm and difference a contempt that rises magnificently above both God and evil and feels itself the initiated accomplice of the abysmal mysteries of life and death I am quite aware that these experiences are not peculiar to me I have a shrewd suspicion that all the children of men come under this influence at one time or another I think, however, that the abnormal receptivity of my temperament makes me especially liable to them and it is for this reason that I offer myself to psychological analysis as a particularly emphatic type This sketch might be made much more interesting and effective if I set out to project a deliberately imaginative dramatic figure such as I could wish to be such as I could myself contemplate with love or pity or admiration but such imaginative projections to be convincing and touching require a lifelong training of the self-conscious mind such projections are, as a matter of fact what artists and artistic-minded people naturally do evoke they mix their imagination with their senses and their senses with their reason and upon the resultant amalgam they throw the inspiring torch flame of some great symbolic purpose they do not stop to ask whether they are on the right path the path justified by objective truth or by material reality they just steer boldly forward and in an unscrupulous, pragmatic excitement create or half create their own truth as I shall endeavour to show later my own attitude to these people is one of ingrained contempt I despise their imaginative projections their artistic-pragmatic pseudo truths I am all for the bare, bold, merciless determinism of drastic conformity with fact it is very quaint the way I feel in this matter for, of course, among the great artists who are now dead and buried in whom I love so well there must have been many who played fast and loose with their pleasant dreams just as these moderns do and yet I'm not sure there seems a certain affectation of artistic attitudes common to our generation from which the older masters were free or is it only that being so near to them their little ways are more annoying? I do not know I only know that it is absolutely impossible for me to make an attractive work of art out of the contemplation of my own moods this sketch resolves itself then into what I should be inclined to claim as one of the most cold-blooded dissections on record of a living person by his own hand it is incomplete because the opinion of our day is unprepared to welcome absolute candour but as far as it goes it is drastically sincere it is meager and dry and sapless but it is this because apart from the special outward objects that inspire me, my mind is meager and sapless and dry to the question what use then is publishing such a depressing document? I should answer at once that the value of the thing is strictly psychological and as such of immense and suggestive interest given an eloquently impassioned critic and not even my enemies would deny my right to that title it is I maintain of curious and delicate interest to know what the texture of such a critic's mind is like I am always engaged in analysing the minds of clever artists let me for once undertake the less pleasing task of analysing the mind of a clever critic Incidentally, such an analysis is bound to throw a certain interesting light upon the relations between criticism and creation After all, it is perhaps just as well that the temper of the public should have made it impossible for me to do more than allude to any of my peculiarities which may be antisocial or antinomian it is so easy if once one begins dealing with more sensual attributes to be led into the most fantastic exaggerations one requires a touch as light as Gossamer seen and as penetrating as a net spring to follow into their elaborate intricacies the sensual proclivities of even the most skiless among us and after all, what most of us would be tempted to undertake if we entered upon such an enterprise would be an indication with wanton flights of fancy not of what we have ever done or are likely to do under the existing pressure of circumstances and situation but of what we could conceive ourselves doing if this or that obstacle were removed an obstacle which we know very well never in the nature of things can be removed an obstacle which would probably turn out to be our own tenderness of heart a timidity of spirit or timidity of conscience I have not indulged in descriptions of how I feel in English country gardens as compared with my sensations in the corridors of American hotels or how I feel in the presence of crowded audiences as compared with my emotions in the solitude of a railway carriage for these things are not really germane to the matter what I have attempted to do is sum up as clearly as possible the most salient and persistent of my instinctive reactions to the general drama of the world and my most inveterate and obstinate attitudes to men to nature and to the unknown and there seems to emerge from it all for me at least the image of a nervous timid morban but at the same time reckless figure a figure full of quaint anxiety and to be loved and admired but utterly unable to love or admire itself a figure troubled and perverted by strange obsessions a figure blinded by obstinate pride yet crippled by ridiculous humility a figure grotesque and comic but not devoid of elements of lawn distinction a figure fleeing across an interminable desert to escape from the shadow of itself a figure half-dean and atrophied responsive as a reed to celestial harmonies a figure driven forward by fate yet pathetically seeking to love the fate that drives it a figure fetid and bound by sensual infirmity yet mocking with subtle derision every ideal that would liberate it a figure struggling beneath the burden of its wretched contradictions yet looking for no issue from its dilemma savin' the narcotic power of critical analysis and the obliterating power of death for out of the ghastliness of the historic cataclysms which surround us now there must sooner or later be a return to the cultivation of our own particular gardens and my garden of oblivion until I die can be nothing else of that at least I am sure than the memory of great men and the interpretation of their labours End of Part 3 Part 4 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeas and Lou Ellen Poeas Confessions by John Cooper Section 4 I have no philosophy not even the philosophy of having no philosophy By this last remark I mean that my scepticism is genuine scepticism not as so often happens a mere synonym for dogmatic agnosticism I do not construct out of my scepticism any system of universal doubt I doubt even the validity of doubt I hold myself perfectly free to dally with any kind of metaphysical or mystical interpretation of things which may happen to attract me I hold myself free to give myself up in passing to any religious revelation that may strike my fancy I hold myself at liberty even to play with what is called faith Let me try to put down point by point how these evasive ultimate tendencies really do present themselves as I disentangle them I think it may be said that though no rigid exclusion of idealistic interpretations closes absolutely any doors for me my general bent is towards what is roughly called materialism I say roughly called because I am not ignorant of the metaphysical and psychological dilemmas implicit in any rigidly monistic system at the same time I have never been able to see that the spiritual attenuation if I may call it so to which what we roughly name matter has been recently subjected necessarily implies any support to the claims of the idealists the world may be full of mysterious living forces it may have a boundless tendency to burst out here and there into all manner of conscious forms and shapes it may be prolific of amazing organisms it may be deep and strange and unfathomable it may possess levels beyond levels of cosmic entities and inconceivable beings it may dwindle off into unthinkable spatial planes but I can never bring myself to see why this quite possible multitudinous of life's pregnancy should be dragged into to support the obviously human made systems of idealistic or religious comfort the world may be as deep and mysterious as you will but that does not in the least imply that we shall have a life after death or that there is a god whether personal or imminent in the least concerned with us perhaps what I feel about it is rather what the ancient historians felt. There are very likely gods and demigods innumerable in life's teeming planes of existence but their own pleasures and their own annoyances are quite sufficient to fill up their time. I am not therefore a materialist in the dogmatic sense but I lean considering the important part played by what is conveniently called matter in our human sphere to a materialistic view of our own particular fate it is in fact upon the inscrutable mysteriousness of the world that I take my stand I find myself constantly protecting as it were this large and tremendous mysteriousness against explanations which seem to impair its dignity this is no doubt the origin of much of my prejudice against current theology it is certainly the origin of my profound suspicion of current science I want to keep the fresh, formidable beautiful virginity of the world if I may be allowed to put it so unravelled by priest or professor I feel so often as though that indescribable quality which the poets call magic were in danger of being destroyed by these cut and dried idealistic assumptions the dignity of death is for instance absolutely spoiled for me by easy arrogant hopes of joyful resurrection even the great buddhist theory of successive incarnations seems to me less poetical than the finality touched with a remote just articulated chance of something else of the tragic pagan Ave Atquavale it is really I fancy on behalf of this dramatic mysteriousness of things with its astounding fusion of comic and tragic elements that I reluctant committing myself to any clear cut solution I think it is also because I feel certain that no solution will prove the final one but experience indeed a curious anger against certain clever modern philosophers whose crafty reasoning lends itself to the comfortable uses of optimistic apologists if such people as these I say to myself find support in such theories then such theories must be wrong yes at the bottom of my mind I discern an instructive and inevitable assumption that no theory of the universe which anybody has ever had or will conceivably ever have can possibly be true as for the popular Hegelian idea of progressive evolutionary truth I despise and deride it the ultimate secret is as far off now as it was in the time of Heraclitus and I have a suspicion that all who do not confess this are either waves or forms I do not carry the skepticism so far as to doubt the existence of what we call objective truth such an extreme of the personal method seems to me grotesque and insane besides carried to its absurd limit it renders all conversation between intelligent beings impossible some definite and unalterable relation in my mind and its natural surroundings must be a permanent thing in our planetary history otherwise we should be condemned to the incomunicable muteness of fishes pluralism is a pleasant theory to play with and perhaps has its place but I must confess that the indissoluble unity of the world of which we form a part is borne in upon me as an axiomatic necessity of my consciousness the universe may have all manners of layers and levels of divergent life its fluctuating waves of being may ebb and flow through incredible varied spheres but one cannot formulate and thought any gaps or blank spaces there not connected by some sort of delicate ethereal medium the universe must remain a universe while our mind remains our mind to call it a multiverse is to use language which makes language impossible the same thing applies to the rationality of the world there must be processes sequences harmonics and laws in nature binding all things together and more or less intelligible to us the children of their creation otherwise no kind of science would be possible though I am so anxious to keep the virginal mystery of the world fresh and unraveished I am not now addicted to talk loosely and lightly about the chaotic elements in nature I used to talk in this way but I think it was rather an impatient reaction against idealists than any expression of my own personal feeling I have a rooted prejudice against all synthesis which smell of the pulpit and it is pleasant and consoling to me to think that though there is evidence enough of law and solidarity in the system of things there is not the slightest evidence of such a system being guided or evolved to any definite end or purpose even if such evidence were forthcoming it would still remain extremely improbable that in the vast cosmic orientation whatever it might be there should be any particular consideration in our human wishes and cravings however well the universe may be constructed and however harmoniously nature's laws may work one sees clearly enough that a certain monstrous and lavish waste is an intrinsic peculiarity of the whole system and of this waste of this essential cosmic negligence we may be a self-deluding infinitesimal portion nature may have her own mysterious purposes or she may not in any case our role is bound to be in a dramatic sense that of the fly upon the wheel or to use a more organic metaphor that of the lice in the hide of the rhinoceros there's been too much nonsense lately talked about things being free, arbitrary, individual and redundant of one another I myself reflecting the prevalent fashion have uttered vague words about the chaotic multifariousness of the world I have made much of every trace of theological the exceptional, the perverse I have sought to discern the presence and things of something incalculable and baffling of something that suddenly leaps up without preparation and goes out of the depths of the Uranian reservoirs it is for this reason that it used to please me well that the modern philosophical catchword should be life rather than matter or motion or mechanical force or than that old un-psychological figment mind and the abstract life though it might not carry us far it seemed, or I said it seemed much more suggestive than any of these others as a focusing word for the ultimate mystery for it had the advantage of emphasising the unique, arbitrary and personal element in what is presented to us it will be seen from all this that when I spoke of my preference for what I called the chaotic in life I was using the word in the sense of something that was wayward wanton and incalculable not in the old motonic sense of pre-created debris and dust I blush now to think how far in my casual conversation and lectures I carried this absurd belief that things were chaotic and this fantastic preference for such a world nothing could be really further from my true feeling nothing could be further from my wish as to what the universe should be I must have been betrayed into this treachery to my own disposition by some species of proud and mischievous spleen and by an unconscious following of literary fashions as a matter of fact these chaotic forms and shapes their sudden groupings and miraculous chances of contact though they seem to have about them all the arbitrary magic of the unknown depths and to be quite independent of the uniform precision of cause and effect are really as much a determined part of the whole inexorable stream of things as the most mechanical sequence though there be world within world of spiritual or ethereal entities they're all equally dominated by destiny they're equally driven forward by the same universal impetus the smallest fancies that pass through our brain and the strangest remotest inhabitants of the Father Star are alike determined in their nature by a fatality that admits of no interruption or deviation this does not in the least debar us from giving ourselves up to the exquisite imaginations of artist and poet such imaginations are also part of the irresistible unfolding of what has been implied from eternity we do not know how far they will carry us we do not know how far our own thoughts will carry us but both they and our matter streams are all accounted for in the terrible beautiful procession of lives and thoughts the procession of things and the shadows of things which is all there is and from which there is no escape we may use what in our necessary illusions we call our free will to the utmost extent we may struggle we have a right to struggle passionately to change our nature but our nature will never really be moved one hears breath from what has been determined for it and every one of our vaunted new thoughts and new emotions has really been inevitable from the beginning if we struggle desperately to improve or change that very wall to struggle was what our universal destiny implied in us and if we do not struggle that atrophy and inertia also was what the universe intended I once fancy that I shared with Bergson and James those plausible sophists a predilection for the instinctive over the logical but I now know falling back upon my real feeling that it is neither instinct nor logic that can save us from the inexorable pressure of life's fatality it is quite in harmony with what one experiences in the daily commerce of events that nature should be at the same time driven irresistibly forward and apparently prone to a thousand goblin like absurdities it is prone to absurdities these are not only apparent they are real but proneness to goblin like absurdity is part of the universe's inherent necessity the universe is both fated and fantastic one can see clearly why it should strike us in this double-edged manner when one thinks of it as completely indifferent to our personal desires for just in proportion as we desire fluidity and malleable-ness it arrests us with its granite-like immovable weight and just in proportion as we desire security and stability it leaks out at us with wanton and ironic capriciousness this astounding mixture in the system of things of rigid cosmic laws and apparent chaotic surprises is precisely what pleases my aesthetic sense and the sardonic shocks it gives on the one hand to optimistic rationalism and on the other to optimistic pragmatism fill me with humorous satisfaction I cannot help it if any gentle spirit protests that such an attitude is one of pure malice I'm not defending myself there may be malice in it there may even be a touch of perverse voluptuousness possibly an absurd element of pride if so, I can only look with amazement at myself an observe with psychological interest the odd spectacle of a human being deriving voluptuous and humorous pleasure from the pathetic inability of other human beings to grasp the mystery of life as a matter of fact, I am convinced that all philosophic attitudes are the result of temperament generally the part played by reason is the part of defending and supporting as cunningly and persuasively as possible this initial bias but in certain rare cases it happens that a philosopher summons his reason not to defend his temperament but to outrage it elacerate it and contradict it in such a case we have a system of philosophy based not upon the pleasure the philosopher gets from offending the natural tastes of others but upon the pleasure he gets from offending his own but even here, though so perversely employed the man's temperament is at the bottom of his method I do not think, however, that my philosophy is of that kind at all events I recognise it as a profound tendency in myself to sweep aside the plausible structures of logical thought which philosophers raise and to dig down with curious psychological zest into the personal will and taste and prejudice of the philosopher himself for me, as I have hinted the world of human beings, their character, their predilections their love and their hate is a world fatally and rigidly determined and that is probably why I deal so habitually in patient and ironical agreement and find it so hard to indulge in argument or controversy my underlying spinosism, if I dare call it by so ambitious a name probably accounts also for my indifference to detail among the exacting transactions of life and my tendency to let things drift as they will, why make a fuss when or at the last is equal but beyond and below spinosism or any other fatalistic method of reasoning in which I may love to indulge lies undoubtedly in my own instinctive conviction that nothing matters that there is no real human meaning in life at all and no beginning or middle or end of life's teeming manifestations, all is equal those sinister syllables keep up a sort of recurrent tune in the depths of my mind all is equal why then grow agitated and angry because this or that ridiculous human being acts according to his nature it is no doubt out of a sort of willing reaction from the somber inertia of this moon that I love to dally as I call it with the more gracious aspects of religion, innately I regard religion, the catholic church for instance as a noble and beautiful work of art constructed anonymously by humanity for its own satisfaction and offering a lovely and romantic escape from the banalities of existence and the least troubled by its inconsistencies or impossibilities, if it were not hyperbole impossible, if it did not come flaming in from outside the closed circle it would not be worthy of the name of religion a rational religion as a contradiction in terms and only thoroughly stupid people are interested in such an anomaly the value to me of this wonderful invention having appeared at all upon the earth is the fact that its appearance makes one consider once more how extremely likely it is that the real truth of the universe is something amazingly absolutely different from anything that anyone has dared to dream, religion at any rate must always have this value that it prevents our self-satisfied men of science from closing the door to staggering chances as the supreme work of art of our race I have the utmost reverence for religion and as a protest against barring out incredible possibilities I regard it with admiration when however it becomes a question of possessing faith or what is called the religious sense I must confess to a cold and complete indifference, once sometimes he is worthy people express the view that atheism is an impossible thing that there can be no such person as an atheist and that those who call themselves so do not know their own mind or are deliberately indulging in fantastic privado I can never understand this view of the case it seems to me that I am meeting atheists every day that is to say I am not endowed by nature with faith or with the religious sense for myself I can only say that however deeply I search my heart and soul I do not find the remotest trace of these interesting gifts nor do I feel as though I permitted such instincts to perish in me through lack of cultivation I do not feel as though they had atrophied from disuse I feel as though I had never been there I certainly cannot remember them though I can remember very vividly certain disgustingly hypocritical attempts I made at various times to pretend to myself that they were there this fact the fact of one tolerably sensitive person being entirely devoid of the religious sense is surely not without its significance at any rate disposes of the argument of the universality of the instinct I should be untrue to my attempt at getting really to the bottom of my emotions in these things if I neglected to speak of the curious thrill which the idea of the person of our saviour always produces in me I notice that this thrill only occurs when it is accompanied by the notion that it naturally is with me of his divinity the idea of a great good sage going about doing admirable works and finally giving up his life for humanity leaves me absolutely cold I even feel an odd sense of anger when I hear worthy ethical rationalist talk as they do of Jesus and Socrates that sort of thing freezes my interest like a bucket of ice water I suppose it is an artistic instinct in me indignant at this clumsy and stupid lack of appreciation for the most wonderful work of art our race has ever evoked it is precisely the attraction and magic of this figure created a God by the mysterious self mesmerism of the human race which causes the thrill which I feel a merely good man possessed of an unusual love for humanity does not particularly impress me I do not love humanity myself and I do not feel any particular sympathy with those who do I am ready to confess as a proof of my sincerity towards my religious friends that I cannot altogether explain the thrill that I have referred to it resembles in character the feeling I have when I read an especially magical line in poetry the only moment which ever gives me the sensation of tears is it an atavistic thing I wonder a reversion in me to the medieval emotions of my ancestors or is it a purely artistic impulse I refuse to call it religious because it is not connected in the remotest way with any need or desire to worship it certainly is not moral because I have often experienced it when I was about some deed that had no relish of salvation in it and it has been accompanied by no shadow of remorse or scruple before leaving this interesting borderland of philosophy and religion I want to say a word about the absence in me of the mystical sense I know no human being less of a mystic than I am in this matter my reverent and sceptical materialism, if that is the best word to describe it goes to the extreme limit fancies about an over-soul in things or an anima-mundi always rousing me images of a comic kind I see the universe as an enormous sponge through which the spirit, or whatever they call it pours seething and fermenting like cider out of a vat the something far more deeply interfused of the words worthy in ecstasy leaves me contemptuously frigid I am tempted to give to this great pantheistic emotion the grossest and most material causes I am always driven to associate it with animal feelings of purely biological well-being I was not born to be a pantheist the idea of worshipping God in nature or worshipping nature as God has never had the remotest appeal for me my instincts are all pantheistic a quite unmistacle and perfectly naive worship of the sun, or the moon or any particular planet I understand and sympathise with I know what is meant by the phrase cosmic emotion but I never feel it what I feel is a perfectly natural and sensual enjoyment of a particular field, or flower garden or river bank I do not want these things to lead me to the brink of heaven or to the feet of God the spiritual raptures of Shelley's ethereal inspiration please me as poetry but in practice a curious vein of humorous and cynical realism holds me bound to the earth in these things I am frankly and grossly material what appeals to me in nature what gives me always the most thrilling delight is what one has learned to call the magic of her fleeting and evasive charm this magic however has nothing to do with the ethical secrets or with hidden spiritual depths it is not hidden at all the whole wonder and beauty of it is that it is on the surface it comes and goes, it allows and escapes the appeal it makes is not to the mystical sense but to the poetical sense it is the amorous witchery of the earth maidens and the irresistible laughter of the earth gods End of Part 4 Part 5 of Confessions of Two Brothers this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeus and Lou Ellen Poeus Confessions by John Cooper section 5 Passing from religion into the world of moral problems I am especially anxious to make my real attitude as it wavers and flickers as clear as possible it is here that one is especially tempted to make the best of one's little ways and to round off with a show of consistency moods and impulses that are at bottom absolutely inconsistent and yet how interesting it were if the most ordinary of human beings could be persuaded to analyse and set down with genuine unscrupulousness his real moral experiences it was surely a matter of some psychological importance perhaps even of some ethical importance if a person could bring himself to state frankly where and at what points his own private conscience moves in agreement with the social conscience and where it deviates from it and pursues its own road I suppose that in the last resort I must be what they call a hedonist that suspicious sounding name which made Pater wish that everybody knew Greek but ultimately I pursue pleasure and pleasure alone as the chief end of my cults and activities the poignancy of the situation as far as conscience is concerned begins to assert itself for me at those points where my pleasure conflicts directly with the pleasure of other people until some point of this kind is reached I am absolutely devoid of scruple my line of thought and action may run dead contrary to the conscience of the community to which I belong without my experiencing the least discomfort of soul I may think and do things absolutely under the ban of the current ethical code and my conscience will remain gay and unruffled it will even feel a certain agreeable tickling of pleasant self-approbation it is when my pursuit of pleasure crosses with a direct impact the instinct of self-preservation in others that the pinch comes I am by disposition and taste fatally aware of the existence of these other people of these alien egoists in my path it is as disagreeable to me to render more then as it is to break the branches of delicate trees and the roots of sensitive flowers an egoist myself I know well how egoists suffer when their particular life illusion is interfered with or their particular aesthetic vistas blocked up and every man, woman or child I meet is an egoist for me I suspect them all of living ultimately for nothing but pleasure even as I do they may talk of duty and self-culture in the service of humanity and the will of God I seem to wave aside all that and perceive under every mask the old eternal pressure of the life lust it causes me much inconvenience this conscience of mine many sacrifices many wretched, unillumined hours I sometimes hesitate on the brink of envying those thicker-skinned more impervious scoundrels who I head mercilessly and strike out for what they want even across the bodies of their friends but I never do really envy them I think I have an instinctive feeling that the same imperiousness in them which makes such indifference possible causes them to lose endless exquisite emotions of pleasure to which my less unruffled skin remains porous and sensitive and one of those who would never be able unless under circumstances of intolerable aggravation to leave attire some friend or companion and lash out for liberty at every cost to cut difficult knots by quitting as my American moralist recommends is out of the question for me I must not claim too much virtue it is probably not merely my dislike of giving other people unpleasant shocks but my dislike of receiving them myself which restrains me I am naturally averse to any kind of drastic action in fact I dislike all action whether drastic or otherwise my atavistic reversion if we all do really have so quaint a thing as towards the passive rather than the predatory world I suppose my ideal existence out of the human circle would be that of some happy, iridescent jellyfish expanding its sunlit body and placid warmth at the bottom of a rock pool hurting nothing and being hurt by nothing and living entirely for sensation apart from the jellyfish I find the life of a prairie bison a very desirable one lizards in the desert seem also enviable and there is much to be said to my thinking for the innocent role played in this life medley by the lichen upon an apple tree or the moss upon the roots of an elm this singular reluctance on my part to strike out in mould as they say my own life is connected I fancy with every one of my profoundest instincts I cannot enjoy the idea of giving people violent jerks and blows I cannot enjoy the effort, the action the dealing with material difficulties that such movements require I long for things to change but to change things one has to have the energetic willpower of a demiurge and there is absolutely nothing demiurgic about me I like the sensation of being created I do not at all like the responsibility of creation I am always skeptical too about any change there are bound to be people and things wherever I go clamorous, obtrusive and demanding some kind of response customers made the things I am used to more easy to handle I have acquired the tricks of my own burrow and know how to avoid the barking dogs and the men with guns if I go forth into new fields the chances are that I shall encounter much more noisy invaders of my solitude what is called travelling always implies policemen, inspectors, custom house officers and government officials it often implies bandits and brigands an individual with a nervous dislike of his fellow men will wise to remain at home I may go far in search of quietness after all, discover no path so unfrequented as the one I have learned to find the way to from my own backdoor I have acquired by long experience the art of moving among turnips and mangle-wisels why should I go stumbling forth to find cactus and deadly nightshade my unwillingness to march forth to liberty over the bodies of people is further accounted for by a quaint fear I have that I may suddenly discover depths of affection and tenderness in me that I never suspected one would feel a considerable fall if one sacrificed love to liberty only to find oneself in another kind of prison and love murdered at the gate one never can tell one cries aloud for freedom and strikes down this or that barrier only to fall into some devilish gin far more murderous than the last to preserve the liberty of one's thought that at least is something while one can go aside in lonely places and mutter one's weariness of flesh and blood into the ear of the elements one's lot is not hopeless apart from my fear of unsuspected depths in my affections I am prevented from deserting my post by a much less admirable quality I have to confess the truth a absurd desire to be regarded with fondness and complacency if not with respect to be considered a hard-hearted ruffian by parent or wife or child would be extremely disagreeable to me one curious and most fortunate gift I owe to my good genius I have absolutely no pining for what is called spiritual affinity I have not the least objection to living with people of divergent or even opposite tastes in the abstract I cannot even regard such affinity as a thing to be desired it presents itself to me as a spiritual invasion as a rushing in of alien waters into my sequestered harbour as something troublesome, exacting and confusing I like being myself and going my own way and I like my companions to do the same such contrarities afford an opportunity for me to indulge my predilection for irony, for psychological analysis and for living a double life I despise people who must always be receiving sympathetic ascent to their ideas I do not want sympathy, I want kindness, fondness and affection all that I have just said applies to my habitual feeling about spiritual affinity in the abstract as a matter of fact, in one single human case I have had the good fortune to know the pleasure of such an affinity an actual experience in this case I did not ask for it or seek for it, it just occurred and I am bound to confess at the risk of being held inconsistent that it has turned out one of the great felicities of my life is it necessary for me to add that this startling interrupter of my method this bold subverter of my abstract theories is one of my own seeks? no, with regard to matters of conscience I am extraordinarily unwilling to override my friends or cause them shocks or inconveniences I continually go out of my way and worry myself with teasing burdens for their sakes I sacrifice the main object of my life to them that is to say my pleasure and I land myself in situations that necessitate what I detest above everything else that is to say action lest this should be regarded as a monstrous boast or virtue I hasten to add that it only applies to little external things in the larger issues of life short of molding great events and inaugurating new departures I generally get what I want and I get it not by any elaborate Machiavellian schemes but by a certain pliability of nature which makes it possible for me to bend like a reed without ever breaking my egoism has its own perfectly unconscious and instinctive arts which reach the end by the most devious and unexpected paths I am naturally much more sympathetic with the physical sufferings of people than with those of a moral kind I always regard physical suffering as an outrage as a scandalous anomaly as an insult to the harmony and pleasantness of life I am not one of those who think that we gain by suffering and become nobler According to my experience, people lose by it and are hampered, stupefied, mutilated, distorted and embittered In this matter of physical suffering my conscience does not only work negatively it works positively it runs into very extreme excesses it becomes what many people would call diseased this is the cause, among others why I can never bring myself to eat the flesh of oxen, sheep and pigs it is not that I object to their being killed it is that I dislike extremely the manner of their killing if people went out into the pastures and gave these innocents pleasant little electric shocks that cause them to fall instantaneously dead in the midst of their browsing I would eat them with avidity the same thing applies to socialism my conscience compels me to be a socialist and I suppose I shall always be one though none could dislike more than I the idea of being interfered with by a stupid set of moralistic bureaucrats I have no prejudices in the matter of political freedom I listen with humorous contempt to the inane chatter of democratic idealists I would resign my political rights tomorrow with absolute equanimity if some great despotic commission of Kitcheners and Roosevelt's could settle the matter of poverty once and for all and arrange that everybody should have the pleasures of life and be well fed, warm and contented I prize liberty as much as any in fact liberty is the breath I must breathe but I would willingly submit to serious contaminants of the invaluable thing if, by so doing, I could relieve my conscience at a stroke of this uncomfortable background of responsibility for the abominable miseries which we inflict on the poor it is in things of this kind that my conscience pricks and plagues me in other matters where there is no question of giving people or animals direct discomfort I have no conscience at all in realms of comfort outside the question of causing suffering I do exactly and precisely what I please limited only by motives of expediency this sounds wonderfully heroic and antinomian in reality I shrewdly suspect it is very much what everybody else does for I notice that the human conscience is more alert and condemnation of others than punctilious and self-discrimination and when one comes to examine into the matter what enormous mass of so-called moral restraint is purely in a fear of expediency certain lapses, certain wanderings from the path seem to us best avoided not in the least because the current morality condemns them but simply because, given the circumstances we are in they would lead to troublesome situations and embarrassing complications take the virtue out of the world which is the result of pusillanimity and caution and how much would be left for myself I can only pray that I shall always find it wise and expedient to be sweet-tempered friendly, considerate and amusing rather than sour, irritable, heavy-handed gloomy and dull for in the last resort it is the happy and gracious people who make life tolerable and the soul-key touchy ill-conditioned wretches who poison its pleasant hours at the same time I must confess I would prefer to spend my days with an irritable egoist who possessed genius even though he made life extremely inharmonious rather than with a cheerful fool who could do nothing but amiably chuckle this however is a matter of taste as a general rule then, my conscience is quiet and flexible economic injustice, the disgusting slaughter of animals brutality of parents towards children vivisection, harshness to prisoners are the only things that really rouse and excite it though I am conscious of remorse when I inflict upon my friends the discomfort in my moods of animal depression or the morose-ness of ill-health End of Part 5 Part 6 of Confessions of Two Brothers This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cooper Poeas and Llewellyn Poeas Confessions by John Cooper Section 6 To turn to a completely different aspect for one's life I suppose it would be impossible for any human being to be more absolutely under the dominance of literature than I am I think by books I move in an atmosphere of books I am an infatuated bookworm To the influence of books I have come lately to add the influence of art But it is art approached through books interpreted by books and loved for bookish reasons This sub-sequious submission to literature and art follows naturally from the morbid receptivity of my nature It follows too from my curious dislike of self-assertion and my weary desire to lie back upon something or other external to myself I love books and pictures just as I love fate They are something upon which I can lean Something in which I forget myself and lose myself Something in the presence of which my clumsy and turbulent identity melts and grows lucid, flowing, transparent This too-too-solid flesh of mine thaws and resolves itself into a dew when brought near to these delicate influences They satisfy also my deep-seated and inveterate longing for romance Something that shall lead my spirit far away from their cursed commonplace and send it sailing free over distant horizons I hate and loathe the commonplace and yet because of my abnormal receptivity the commonplace invades and stifles me more abominably than any one thing I know Certain vile, concentrated incarnations of the commonplace especially seem to arrest and paralyze me such as the effect of that horrid moment after midday lunch when, in any decent English establishment one is decently conscious that the unfortunate servants are all gathered at the sink washing odious, greasy dishes such as the effect of those bleak, littered, fretted hours of miserable waiting when intolerable visitors drag on their inane conversation and one watches in a kind of petrified torpor the cups of lukewarm tea and the photographs on the mantelpiece At such times a mad receptivist such as I am suffers misery beyond words Lucky indeed are those happy people whose nervous skins are thick enough to endure these bleached hours and their withering negations without experiencing a sensation as though their heads were going to burst Such happy people have the power of lolling interminably on sofas and couches when there is no one there who is beautiful and nothing there that is exciting and no discussion there that can rouse the remotest tinge of interest Much of this sort of thing would literally drive me out of my wits and send me with the king of Babylon to eat grass in the pastures I am especially adapted to be the half-suffocated victim of the commonplace because my damned consideration for other people prevents my lashing out and taking myself off and my yet more accursed receptivity throws me stripped and helpless into the horrid moments more Artists, excellent drastic egoists can strike out and be merciless they must have their little attics and studios to themselves or they will roar like ten thousand bulls but I, poor receptive madman, absolutely lack this shrewd creative energy in the midst of the materials of life I am as helpless under these blighting social sorocos as a bear tied to a pole I seem to have a pathetic idea that I have only to remain passive and quiccent and all the perfumes of Arabia will float through my senses instead of which what floats through me is the withering, devastating breath of every commonplace person and object and thought and belief and ambition that our wretched race has ever evoked it is out of the utter paralysis of misery which the invasion of the commonplace causes me that I cling so desperately to literature and art being it once so wretchedly receptive and so absurdly romantic and being at the same time so devoid of the aggressive creative faculty I turn to literature and art as my one grand escape in exciting stories I can forget my vexatious plight and sail away down lovely rivers of enchantment quite oblivious of people and things in poetry and philosophy I can see the world transfigured and even learn the secret of that exquisite lie which would make me believe that the commonplace itself is wonderful and charming if only one looks at it from a certain angle I confess I've never been able to find this angle but it is a relief to be told that it is there it is curious that I should, in my general feeling about life demand a certain drastic realism with certain stern abrupt unmitigated edges and yet require art and literature to protect me from reality when it is near at hand the truth is that in the background of my picture of life I like the grey formidable skyline of austere and blurred unsophoned fact while in the foreground and even in the middle distance I like the tender deceptive colouring of literary association this is because I feel that in ultimate things the facts of the situation are more mysterious and terrific than any artist's stream I wish to protect them from artist's streams I wish to keep them untouched and impenetrable it irritates me to see these artists and poets protect their impertinent personal fancies upon those granite walls but when it comes to the little things of life when it comes to the immediate world of commonplace persons and ambitions then by all means let us have the artist's imaginative creations and give them full play let us have the lovers too and the priests and the philosophers let us have even the sensualists let there be a general conspiracy of exquisite fantastics against this bleak and horror domination let all things be seen through the magical blurring mirrors of literature and art through these two mirrors I at any rate see everything that comes near me some people have accused me of being deplorably dramatic and theatrical this is a mistake I am only dramatic in a literary sense and only theatrical when my theatrical attitudes have received a literary consecration there are plenty of people naturally dramatic and born with a mania for dramatic situations who are not literary at all I have I confess a deplorable weakness for dramatic situations but they must have that deeper richer more continuous atmosphere of literary pungency about them to make them really my true element I am dramatic but not melodramatic this tendency of mine never to see anything directly as it is in clear objective transparency but always through some kind of heightened medium has at different times proved very irritating to my companions why cannot I they say interest myself in the things actual shape and colour and texture why cannot I search out in it the impersonal rhythm of nature and her subtle mathematical laws and with people in situations too why cannot I grasp them in their natural independence why must I always be dragging in memories, associations and personal prejudices why does not the beauty of the clear cut reality suffice me without blurring it and disfiguring it with the oblique mists of sentiment and fantastic romance why cannot I even for a moment forget the drama of my sensations and become a clear camera plate for recording the truth why in a word am I always so hopelessly subjective well I have no defense to offer no reply to make I can only say that thus and not otherwise have the blessed gods created me and thus and not otherwise I shall be to the end I am the slave of books the slave of sensations and the slave of my unfortunate receptivism nothing is more interesting than to lay one's finger on the false hypocritical gestures into which at times nearly all of us are betrayed I do not profess to be able to unmask myself at every point our power of self-deception is deep as the salt sea but I think I have noticed one most curious piece of pretence in my habitual procedure which I will hasten to expose it is this in my writings and lectures I continually advocate a certain elaborate epicurean cult a cult of sensations and ideas deliberately undertaken with a view of deepening and intensifying one's vision of life I speak tenderly and passionately of this premeditated art making the utmost of every drop of time I speak of the epicurean pleasure to be derived from the least and most ordinary events of every day its food and fire, its sunrise and sunset its felicitous groupings, its chants and counters its fortunate omens, its gifts of comedy and tragedy its sacramental and symbolic burden I speak of a deliberate refinement of our powers of appreciation and understanding of a deliberate cultivation of our consciousness so that it should embrace more and more of the rich and astounding spectacle offered to our enjoyment I talk of this art of lingering delicately by the way tasting everything as it passes in its sweet confusion and committing oneself to nothing as though it were an art I myself followed in my own life and wherein I were a master and adept as a matter of fact, I am the very opposite of all this the above is my doctrine, the doctrine I have drawn from my favourite writers but my practice is the extreme contrary certainly I follow pleasure but anything more different from my way of following it and the wise, deliberate, organised way recommended in what I speak and write could hardly be conceived here and it is an interesting psychological fact I fall completely away from my conscious philosophy I fall back upon the unconscious in myself upon moods and impulses which spring up independently of any art of life according to my philosophy it will wisdom to balance one sensation against another and to connect them all reasonably and intelligently like precious beads upon the silver cord of my self-consciousness my doctrine is that I should let nothing pass and abstract the lovely quintessence and delicate, pungent flavour from every single one of my common hours but what in reality do I do? I plunge madly about from hunting ground to hunting ground I sink desperately into this obsession into that vice I let the most gracious moments go by utterly unremarked as I plan and plot the satisfaction of some absorbing desire some ill-balanced greedy wish of course even here my innate tendency to touch life indirectly rules and prevails a certain type of book for instance becomes a vice to me and I read madly, frantically, savagely eventually everything else shut out until a violent reaction comes and I would feign bury the accursed thing at the bottom of the deep sea it is curious how one can be inconsistent with oneself and yet profoundly consistent even in love affairs it has been my experience to find myself combining this tendency to treat things as if they were alcohol or drugs with this other tendency to be indirect evasive, sentimental and to drag in remote fantastic comparisons it is the same with beautiful foreign cities their squares, churches, streets, pictures and canals my critical friends catch me hanging on bridges loitering in gardens standing at gaze and cloisters and alleys and they say they observe a sort of drunken sensuality in my absorption as if I were one of Poisson's amorous satyrs bending over a sleeping nymph it is perfectly true that I have a curious predilection for certain fabrics and materials everybody has I suppose but I must have a way of accentuating and intruding my tastes and turning them into profusities and intoxications otherwise my friends would not be irritated by such harmless fancies I certainly must confess to extremely strong sympathies and antipathies in matters of places and scenery sometimes these run strangely countered to accepted notions of the desirable mountains for instance, dear to nearly all lovers of the picturesque seem to be nothing but depressing, top-heavy excrescences bulging forth from the kindly earth's smooth surface and keeping the sunshine and air out of the dwellings of men huge cataracts, vast rivers, enormous lakes, jagged cataclysmic crevices and titanic canyons are all detestable to me and full of desolation my favourite scenery is the seashore especially when there are vast stretches of sand there or wide salt marshes after the seashore I prefer sandy volcanic plains with an occasional abrupt hill crowned with olive trees and one or two solitary cypresses damp fields, damp woods, damp foliage, damp overgrown gardens full of damp ferns are what I dislike most of all they make me cry aloud for the desert ruins and storms devastate me why could not the creator have dispensed with these discomfortable interruptions to conversation? I certainly feel no inclination to worship him that rideth upon the wings of the wind my god is a god who sits serene and silent under great moonlit palm trees the thought of the large free expanses of the desert whether in its hot noons or under its glittering stars makes me realise what it is that I require from natural scenery I require an escape I require an escape from all disturbing and distracting objects objects and people I want to be liberated from everything that sticks out from everything that calls attention to itself by its colour, its form, its challenge civilised scenery is classical and nobly monotonous it is a background to the distractions of beautiful cities beautiful people and beautiful works of art Gothic scenery is different its hills and rivers, its rocks and chasms are always clamouring to be noticed, to be admired they're always saying, look at us, worship us we are the wondrous works of God the civilised beauty of the desert and seashore makes no barbarous claims of this kind here one can forget every disturbing object every disturbing emotion the universe is adored here under one symbolic element be it sand or water there is no mortal thing to separate us from the horizon of air and sky I confess I derive a certain misanthropic and spinosistic pleasure from seeing things thus reduced to the ascetic minimum of form and colour with nothing but the sea or desert before one the planet falls into its place and the primitive necessity of the elements throws life and its concerns into due proportion End of Part 6