 chapter 36 of John Barley corn or alcoholic memoirs by Jack London this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org chapter 36 back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John Barley corn's white logic on me on my lovely ranch in the valley of the moon brain soaked with many months of alcohol I am oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man in vain do I ask myself why I should be sad my nights are warm my roof does not leak I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite every creature comfort is mine in my body are no aches nor pains the good old flesh machine is running smoothly on neither brain nor muscle is overworked I have land money power recognition from the world a consciousness that I do my need of good in serving others a mate whom I love children that are of my own fond flesh I have done and am doing what a good citizen of the world should do I have built houses many houses and tilled many a hundred acres and as for trees have I not planted a hundred thousand everywhere from any window of my house I can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun my life had indeed fallen in pleasant places not a hundred men in a million have been so lucky as I yet with all this vast good fortune am I sad and I am sad because John Barley corn is with me and John Barley corn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of rational civilization John Barley corn is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barley corn was accessible calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street between the corners the pseudo civilization into which I was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul poison the system of life was so organized that I and millions like me was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops wonder with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barley corn I ride out over my beautiful ranch between my legs is a beautiful horse the air is wine the grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame across Sonoma Mountains wisps of seafog are stealing the afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky I have everything to make me glad I am alive I am filled with dreams and mysteries I am all sun and air and sparkle I am vitalized organic I move I have the power of movement I command movement of the live thing I best ride I am possessed with the pumps of being and no proud passions and inspirations I have 10,000 August connotations I am a king in the kingdom of sense and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust and yet with jaundiced I I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me as if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable these men passed I too shall pass these men toiled and cleared and planted gazed with aching eyes while they rested their labor stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets at the autumn glory of the grape and at the fog wisps stealing across the mountain and they are gone and I know that I too shall someday and soon be gone gone I am going now in my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentist which replace the parts of me already gone never again will I have the thumbs of my youth old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably that punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and forever a slip grip at catch as catch can did for the other my lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory the joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were when in wild nights and days of toil and frolic I strained and snapped and ruptured them never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope clutch in the driving blackness of storm never again can I run with sled dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail I am aware that within the disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony nose less death said all of which does not shutter me to be afraid is to be healthy fear of death makes for life but the curse of the white logic is that it does not make one afraid the world sickness of the white logic makes one grin jacuzzi into the face of the nose less one and to sneer at all the fantasmagoria of living I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection the white logic insists upon opening the long closed books and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust about me is murmur and hum and I know it for the net swarm of the living piping for a little space its thin plate of troubled air I return across the ranch twilight is on and the hunting animals are out I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life here is no morality only in man is morality and man created it a code of action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth yet all this I knew before in the weary days of my long sickness these were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously and played with gently oh so gently as sleeping dogs at the back of consciousness which I did not care to awaken I did but stir them and let them lie I was too wise too wicked wise to wake them but now white logic willy-nilly wakes them for me for white logic most valiant is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream let the doctors of all the schools condemn me white logic whispers as I ride along what of it I am truth you know it you cannot combat me they say I make for death what of it it is truth life lies in order to live life is a perpetual lie telling process life is a mad dance in the domain of flex where in appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow chained to the wheels of moons beyond our kin appearances are ghosts life is ghost land where appearances change transfuse permeate each the other and all the others that are that are not that always flicker fade and pass only to come again as new appearances as other appearances you are such an appearance composed of countless appearances out of the past all an appearance can know is mirage you know mirages of desire these very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable conjuries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable conjuries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future life is apperitional and passes you are an apparition through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire and gibbering you will pass on interfusing permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you and of course it is all unanswerable and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that great fetish which cunt called the world and I remember that another pessimist of sentiency has uttered transient are all they being born must die and being dead are glad to be at rest but here through the dust comes one who is not glad to be at rest he is a workman on the ranch and old man and immigrant Italian he takes his hat off to me in all civility because for sooth I am to him a lord of life I am food to him and shelter and existence he has toiled like a beast all his days and live less comfortably than my horses in their deep strawed stalls he is labor crippled he shambles as he walks one shoulder is twisted higher than the other his hands are gnarled claws repulsive horrible as an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen his brain is as stupid as his body is ugly his brain is so stupid that he does not know that he is an apparition the white logic chuckles to me he is sense drunk he is the slave of the dream of life his brain is filled with super rational sanctions and obsessions he believes in a transcendent overworld he has listened to the vagaries of the prophets who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of paradise he feels inarticulate self affinities with self-conjured non-realities he sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him and that it is his destiny to live forever in the immaterial and super sensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception but you who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence you know him for what he is brother to you and the dust a cosmic joke a sort of chemistry a garmented beast that arose out of the rock of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes he is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee he thumps his chest in anger and roars and quivers with catalytic ferocity he knows monstrous atavistic promptings and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts yet he dreams he is immortal I argue feebly it is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clawed to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities pa is the retort would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire a marionette of the belly and the loins to be stupid is to be happy I contend then your ideal of happiness is a jelly like organism floating in a tideless tepid twilight sea hey oh the victim cannot combat John Barley corn one step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's nirvana the white logic adds oh well here's the house cheer up and take a drink we know we illuminated you and I all the folly and the farce and in my book wall den the mausoleum of the thoughts of men I take my drink and other drinks and roast out the sleeping dogs from the recesses of my brain and hello them on over the walls of prejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief drink says the white logic the Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence and remember what Heinz said well do I remember that flaming Jews with the last breath all is done joy love sorrow macaroni the theater lime trees raspberry drops the power of human relations gossip the barking of dogs champagne your clear white light is sickness I tell the white logic you lie by telling too strong a truth he quips back alas yes so topsy-turvy is existence I acknowledge sadly ah well Liu Ling was wiser than you the white logic guards you remember him I nod my head Liu Ling a hard drinker one of the group of biblis poets who called themselves the seven sages of the bamboo Grove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago it was Liu Ling prompts the white logic who declared that to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as much duckweed on a river very well have another scotch and let semblance and deception become duckweed on a river and while I pour in sip my scotch I remember another Chinese philosopher Wang Zhu who four centuries before Christ challenged this dreamland of the world saying how then do I know but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life those who dream of the banquet wake to lamentation and sorrow those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt while they dream they do not know that they dream some will even interpret the very dream they are dreaming and only when they awake do they know it was a dream fools think they are awake now and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants Confucius and you are both dreams and I who say you are dreams I am but a dream myself once upon a time I swang Zhu dreamt I was a butterfly fluttering hither and thither to all intents and purposes a butterfly I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man suddenly I awaked and there I lay myself again now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man Chapter 36 Chapter 37 of John Barley corn or alcoholic memoirs by Jack London This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 37 Come says the White Logic and forget those Asian dreamers of old time. Fill your glass and let us look at the parchment of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your own warm hills. I pour over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Toque on the rancho called Petaluma. It is a sad long list of the names of men beginning with Manuel Michel Torreño, one-time Mexican governor, commander-in-chief, and inspector of the Department of the Californias, who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Valjejo for services rendered his country and for monies paid by him for ten years to his soldiers. Immediately this musty record of man's landlust assumes the formidableness of a battle, the quick struggling with the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, judgments for closures, writ of attachment, orders of sale, tax liens, petitions for letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched its surface and passed. Who was this James King of William so curiously named? The oldest surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yet only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Valjejo eighteen thousand dollars on security of certain lands, including the vineyard yet to be, called Choké. Wents came Peter O'Connor, and wither vanished after writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a vineyard. Appears Louis Somociane, a name to conjure with. He lasts through several pages of this record of the enduring soil. Comes old American stock, thirsting across the great American desert, mule backing across the Isthmus, wind jamming around the horn to write brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten. Names like Hallock, Hastings, Sweat, Tate, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood, Carleton, Temple. There are no names like those today in the Valley of the Moon. The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names of men of whom I have vaguely heard, but whom I have never known. Kohler and Frohling, who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Choké, but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land. The earthquake of 1906 threw down the winery, and I now live in its ruins. Lamotte, he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by the soil and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the site of his orchards and vineyards, of his proud mansion, of his very fishponds, I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees. Cooper and Greenlaw, on what is called the Hill Ranch, they left two of their dead, Little Lily and Little David, who rest today inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Cooper and Greenlaw, in their time, cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. Today I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be plowed under for green manure. Haska, a dim, legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountains and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable. The location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in Angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavor and flash my name across a page of legal script. Air I pass and the page grows musty, dreamers and ghosts, the white logic chuckles. But surely the striving was not altogether vain, I contend. It was based on illusion and is a lie, a vital lie, I retort, and pray, what is a vital lie, but a lie, the white logic challenges. Come, fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James a bit. A man of health, I say. From him we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to tie. Rationality gelded to sentiment the white logic grins. At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit of reason, the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well. The old, old, ancient, old acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you? Your body, what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your eye is both subject and object. It predicates things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the thought. The knower is what is known. The possessor is the things possessed. After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self and other self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will of the wisp, flitting of ghosts in ghost land. But this man will not accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it. He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick points of sensation, slime oozing and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dung hill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they, monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena, dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not. It is nothing new these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of night. The voodoo's and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the nozzeless one were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their philosophies their devices, by which they half believed they would outwit the nozzeless one and the night. Bog lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird nosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and monderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations. This is the stuff, the phantasms of hope that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels. Your Schopenhauer's, your Strinberg's, your Tolstoy's and Nietzsche's. Come, your glass is empty, fill and forget! I obey, for my brain is now well a crawl with the maggots of alcohol, and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote Richard Hovey. Abstain not, life and love, like night and day, offer themselves to us on their own terms, not ours, accept their bounty while ye may, before we be accepted by the worms. I will cap you, cries the white logic. Know, I answer, while the maggots madden me. I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself, the noseless one, and your way leads to the night. Hedonism has no meaning, it too is a lie, at best the cowards smug compromise. Now I will cap you, the white logic breaks in. But if you would not this poor life fulfill, lo, you are free to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death. And I laugh my defiance. For now, and for the moment, I know the white logic to be the arch-imposter of them all, whispering his whispers of death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own geniochemistry turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots biting alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again the old voice from beyond of my youth, telling me again that still are mine the possibilities and powers which life and the books had taught me did not exist. And the dinner-gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass, jeering at the white logic I go out to join my guests at table, and with assumed seriousness to discuss the current magazines and the silly doings of the world's day, whipping every trick and ruse of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes, and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom. The clown's the thing, the clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labor of thinking, and when the table is finished start practical jokes and set all playing at games which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness. And when the evening is over and good night said, I go back through my book-wall den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the white logic which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep, I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it. I heard youth calling in the night. Gone is my former world delight. For there is not my feet may stay, the morn suffuses in today. It dare not stand a moment still, but must the world with light fulfill. More evanescent than the rose, my sudden rainbow comes and goes. Plunging bright ends across the sky, yea, I am youth, because I die. Chapter 38 The foregoing is a sample roaming with the white logic through the dusk of my soul. To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barley-Corn. And the reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barley-Corn, and that the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many a day and week and month. My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive today on the planet is my unmerited luck, the luck of chest and shoulders and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years. That a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I survived through no personal virtue, but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac, and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barley-Corn. And surviving I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road. It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barley-Corn. My life, my career, my joy in living have not been destroyed. They have been scorched, it is true, like the survivors of Forlorn hopes. They have, by unthinkably miraculous ways, come through the fight to marvel at the tally of the slain. And like such a survivor of old red war who cries out, Let there be no more war, so I cry out, Let there be no more poison fighting by our youths. The way to stop war is to stop it. The way to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium so long as opium was ever accessible and obtainable would have continued unabated. We are so made that is all. We have, with great success, made a practice of not leaving arsenic and strychnine and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barley-Corn the same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics, nor for alcoholics, do I write. But for our youths, for those who possess no more than the adventure stings and the genial predispositions, the social man impulses which are twisted all oary by our barbarian civilization which feeds them poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal boys, now born, or being born, for whom I write. It was for this reason more than any other, and more ardently than any other, that I rode down into the valley of the moon, all a jingle, and voted for equal suffrage. I voted that women might vote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race, would vote John Barley-Corn out of existence and back into the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have been sorely bruised, and that I do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised. The women are the true conservators of the race. The men are the wastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it is by their women that they are saved. About man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink it. And there has never been a day when the women have not resented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had the power to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is to close the saloons. In a thousand generations to come, men of themselves will not close the saloons. As well expect the morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of existence. The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race they will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born, and for the babes of girls too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and sisters of these boys. And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be the toppers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one of these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barley Corn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when no one else drinks, and when no drink is obtainable. On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic that, never having had access to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint old custom, similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches. Chapter 39 Of course no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed drunken. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed. It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and forty-eight days in a wind-jammer around the horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along, and though there was no day of those one hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a drink because I did not desire a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere for drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did not demand alcohol. So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem. This is so easy. Why not keep it up when you get back on land? I weighed this problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute non-contact with alcohol, and out of the data of past experience I reached certain conclusions. In the first place I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine chemical dipsemaniac. Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mine. It is unlike tobacco or cocaine or morphine or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers began socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one. On this long five-months voyage I found that among all my bodily needs not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol existed. But this I did find. My need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship the connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They always occurred linked together. Thus when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights and days and moments all purple passages and freedoms thronged my memory. Venice stares at me from the printed page and I remember the cafe tables on the sidewalks. The battle of Santiago, someone says, and I answer, yes, I've been over the ground, but I do not see the ground nor Kettle Hill nor the peace tree. What I see is the cafe Venus on the Plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying consumptive. The east end of London I read or someone says, and first of all under my eyelids leap the visions of the shining pubs, and in my ears echo the calls for two of bitter and three of scotch. The Latin Quarter at once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple problems of existence. In a pampero off the river-plot we speculate if we are disabled of running into Buenos Aires, the Paris of America, and I have visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices. When we have picked up the northeast trades in the Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu, and while I persuade I see myself again drinking cocktails on the cool lanae and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf rolls in. Someone mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the restaurants of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light and clatter of many tables, where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims of long-stemmed Rhinewine glasses. And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all those fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. Glass in hand. There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resident voices of men when, glass in hand, they shut the gray world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. No, I decided, I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink. But oh, more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before. Never again would I be a peripatetic conflagration. Never again would I invoke the white logic. I had learned how not to invoke him. The white logic now lies decently buried alongside the long sickness. Neither will afflict me again. It is many a year since I laid the long sickness away. His sleep is sound. And just as sound is the sleep of the white logic. And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my forefathers had banished John Barley-Corn before my time. I regret that John Barley-Corn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I was born. Else I should not have made his acquaintance. And I was long trained in his acquaintance. End of Chapter 39 Recorded by Peter Kelleher Eastport Midway, Nova Scotia End of John Barley-Corn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London