The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

If a poet meets an illiterate peasant, they may not be able to say much to each other, but if they both meet a public official, they share the same feeling of suspicion; neither will trust one further than he can throw a grand piano. If they enter a gov­ernment building, both share the same feeling of apprehen­sion; perhaps they will never get out again. Whatever the cultural differences between them, they both sniff in any official world the smell of an unreality in which persons are treated as statistics. The peasant may play cards in the evening while the poet writes verses, but there is one political prin­ciple to which they both subscribe, namely, that among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honor should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least.

PART THREE

The Well of Narcissus

HIC ET ILLE

A mirror has no heart hut plenty of ideas.

malcolm de chazal

A

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

A parlor game for a wet afternoon—imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet litde pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncompli­mentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways.

Some magnify, some diminish, others return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.

The psychoanalyst says: "Come, my good man, I know what is the matter with you. You have a distorting mirror. No won­der you feel guilty. But cheer up. For a slight consideration I shall be delighted to correct it for you. There! Look! A per­fect image. Not a trace of distortion. Now you are one of the elect. That will be five thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

The politician, secular or clerical, promises the crowd that, if only they will hand in their private mirrors to him, to be melted down into one large public mirror, the curse of Nar­cissus will be taken away.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

"After all," sighed Narcissus the hunchback, "on me it looks good."

The contemplation of his reflection does not turn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell in which he is trapped is not a desire for himself but the satisfaction of not desiring the nymphs.

"I prefer my pistol to my p . . . ," said Narcissus; "it cannot take aim without my permission"—and took a pot shot at Echo.

Narcissus (drunk): "I shouldn't look at me like that, if I were you. I suppose you think you know who I am. Well, let me tell you, my dear, that one of these days you are going to get a very big surprise indeed)."

A vain woman comes to realize that vanity is a sin and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors re­moved from her house. Consequendy, in a short while she cannot remember how she looks. She remembers that vanity is sinful but she forgets that she is vain.

He -who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (nietzsche.) A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exag­geration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.

A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of any­thing, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble.