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disavows the fact because the conviction flatters part of him and emancipates part of him
from the responsibility inherent in the truth. What occurred, he was to blame for; in the
future, he will not let it seem so, he will not know it. And now he is indeed but a portion
of himself, cut off in time from the rest.
The flattered fraction, emancipated from responsibility by the denial of a tiny fact,
is the matrix of what I have called Ego in this essay: not the first person itself--not the
humble dignity of "I"--but the remnant the ape bought, the rationalized "I."
So every man tells himself, all the long day, a story--the story of his ego,
canceling event and truth, losing his hold on time.
It is a very sad, funny story. Anyone who has read James Thurber's "The Secret
Life of Walter Mitty" knows how funny. Anyone who has read that story thoughtfully
knows how sad. Walter Mitty, forgetting his rubbers, waiting for his wife to do her
errands, imagining himself this great surgeon, that daredevil, every Hero, is a specimen
of the amnesia--the vanity--which is all that is left of a man when his legends are
removed from him. In this case there's no harm in it, we think. But, if we think again, we
see that Mitty is Everyman and his timeless birthright is become a daydream in these
days.
Mitty is ourselves, imagining what great Selves we might have been. He is the
clerk who, but for certain disadvantages that were no fault of his, would have been
President; the accountant who could have owned the Building, but for the broken leg, the
indigent mother, the asthma. His ego is our ego--so we view Walter Mitty as sympathetic
and not sinister, as comic, not cruel. In the bathos of his ego, we bathe our own. We
anoint ourselves with his frustration. The mangling hoot of his wife is cosmic music,
excusing everybody. The tawdry store-fronts against which he stands in the rain, seeing
himself now as a Paul Bunyan and now as a Saint Paul, are stores of our own blessed
Main Street. We look at Walter Mitty with a priest's eye, finding ave marias in his every
degradation and pater nosters in his planetary escapism.
He is pathetic in his heart, we say; he is wistful; he is greater and braver than his
wife knows or the world; this Everyman's a dreamer. We dote on him.
He is a worm. He is a spectator of life. We dare not follow him home and see how
he toasts himself with every mediocrity, gulps flagons of indignity to save himself the
trouble of standing for any value, swallows his self-respect until the shrillness of his wife
is the very wail of national despair and appeases every principle in sight for a domestic
peace that is never attained but changes in the new minute to unexpected turbulence, so
that his microcosm is a chaos and its incoherence, multiplied in every home, becomes a
rending world-dissatisfaction. To the degree that he is able to imagine, Mitty needs must
grow to hate--to hate the illusions wrought by himself to match his conceit.
He may not have the capacities to be a Great Emancipator or even a Great Dentist.
But, because he is a man, he has innately the ability to experience Greatness in ten
myriads of ways--solitary, nonconforming and pure. This he eschews for the warm bottle
of self-adulation. He puts his pride in his perishable Pontiac and turns over the hours
defeated by that gesture to movies and radio--to Mr. Red Skelton or Miss Kate Smith.
And when she sings to him, he lies back in the swaddling clothes of untied tie,
unbuttoned waistcoat, to enjoy lullaby at his unnatural age. He dreams on the greatness of
his country and does nothing for it even as he feebly dreams on Walter Mitty the Hero.
His songs no longer hope; they are a fatuous repose.
I've watched ten thousand Walters singing "God Bless America" in the smug
assumption that the deed's been done, so that the tepid ditty was not even a prayer but a
profanation, not benediction, but alibi.
This is the story of the ego. As religions try by their legends, their doctrines and
faiths to reassert the simple, lost premises of instinct, and as nations pervert their own
history--as every bounden group of men extracts from itself an aura of moral tales, of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
