The bus is crowded with schoolgirls wearing the uniform of the local parochial institution of secondary education. Although people have been leaving the bus at each stop along the route, every available seat still remains occupied. As one passenger gets up to leave a standee immediately takes his place. At one stop an elderly lady boards the bus. Since there are no empty seats she must stand. It soon becomes obvious that standing is difficult for her. The movements of the bus, especially when stopping and starting, force her to grip the nearest rail as tightly as she can. A youthful black man, probably a student from one of the local area colleges, is sprawled out over a seat designed for two passengers right next to where she is standing. He stares at her as if she were one of the advertisements. The bus stops with a sudden jerking motion. The old lady almost loses her balance but grips the rail in time with all her might to prevent herself from falling. Another lady occupying an aisle seat on the other side rises to leave the bus. A look of relief crosses the face of the elderly lady. But alas, too soon, for one of the schoolgirls literally makes a dive for the empty seat and of course beats the slower moving senior citizen to it. Nothing is said. The lady resumes her faltering posture and begins clinging tightly once again to the rail. An old man sitting behind the schoolgirl stares disapprovingly at the long blond hair hanging over the back of the seat in front of him but keeps his feelings to himself.

*

Whenever I sit down to write in this notebook I sense in the back of my mind a little prodding devil who is always urging me on to some large philosophical question. If I succumb, usually I am either too tired or too lazy-minded to take up the challenge, I nearly always leap onto the back of the first riderless horse that passes and go galloping off towards some very obvious truth. Yet the fact is that I seldom reach the end of the line, for at some point along the way I wander off on a bypath that is only remotely related to the main trail, and as a consequence become so irretrievably lost that I often forget exactly where it was I intended to go in the first place. Thus sheer honesty about my own nature should make it easy for me to declare a moratorium on all general philosophical issues.

*

The best that has been accomplished in this world is probably the result of habit. We are both its slave and its beneficiary. This is why I believe that if I were to describe in detail everything I experienced in one particular day I would in essence be giving an account of my entire life. There is a unity in all things, and as far as the conduct of our lives is concerned, habit is the means by which this unity is maintained. Each day is a miniature lifetime, a microcosm of one’s life, so to speak. In my own case, I would like to begin by burying myself in the details of a single day and once these details have been exhausted proceed to describe my advancement towards the vast open spaces of metaphysical speculation.

*

There is nothing more difficult than trying to remember things exactly as they were.

*

It is not necessarily those visible circumstances in which the body itself is involved or even a spectator that impress themselves most readily on the wax of the memory. Naturally, when one attempts to recall the past, the mind sets itself about the task of seeking out the most obvious encounters. But then, amidst the rapid montage depicting easy realities, something rather queer or uncertain enters the mind’s eye. A question is immediately posed. Did this really happen to me? And if the introspective search is pressed the answer more than likely will be, no, it happened in a far less idealized way than you now visualize. Yet how come it appears so vivid, so clear at the present time?

Simply because you have successfully, from an aesthetic point of view, combined a fact from your life-experience with an imaginative reality. These two elements within your mind overlapped each other until they became one recollected event.

*

My entire existence is based on a compromise between what I want to do and what my duty-oriented conscience orders me to do. The ideal goal, which I imagine everyone more or less seeks, is that which allows for a marriage between necessity and pleasure. Seldom are such marriages consummated although varying degrees of courtship are quite common.

*

It is not that I regard the practical duties of life more important than my writing, but that I prefer performing them during the early part of the day in order to put them behind me as soon as possible to allow for a genuine sense of freedom for the rest of the day. When I write I want to do so with a clear conscience without any lurking shadows casting an unwanted umbrella of dark guilt across my mind. There must be no barriers to the candle power of my imaginative sunlight as it reaches out into every nook and cranny of my thinking-feeling apparatus. I realize that I probably lose many hours of solitude because of this practice, and yet whatever capacity I possess for intense concentration is undoubtedly enhanced.

*

How tightly bound am I to my obligations? There is a marked difference among people on this question. Many persons feel that the only obligation that really matters is the obligation to keep themselves happy and comfortable. One might be inclined at first to judge such people harshly, call them selfish. And probably there are very few of us who have not passed such a judgment on someone whom we thought fitted into that category. Yet I feel certain that even the most selfish individual in the world would wilt under a close examination of his motives. Not that he isn’t sincere, but that his sincerity has causes hidden away in his subconscious mind which are unfaltering props to his fine upstanding appearance in the eyes of society. I realize that this attitude is prevalent especially in intellectual circles today, almost to the point of being a cliche of modern thought. Also, it has had a devastating effect on our ideas or attitude towards heroes and hero worship. Yet, I think, as a psychological approach to behaviorism it is extremely valuable. Hopefully, it can make us wiser appraisers of our fellow men. The fact that so many of the images of our heroes now lie shattered on forgotten junk piles is not as disheartening a sign as one might suppose. Actually it provides evidence of the transitional stage we are passing through. It is almost as though we were moving from one world to another, this latter being the world of the ubermensch. I can even be optimistic about what is happening by convincing myself that when the other world is finally achieved and we have settled down as permanent colonizers on its soil, we will rediscover our heroes and resurrect their reputations. We will be better equipped to distinguish between the true and the false, pretension and real accomplishment. It will mean death to the false gods and an everlasting existence to the genuine ones. This extraordinary power of judgment in the highest echelons of thought will filter down to the everyday basement of life eventually. With all men trying to emulate the true gods, satisfy them with their actions, the world may once again regain its character as a Garden of Eden.

*

Hemingway dead! He shot himself while cleaning his gun. Accident? He was one of those rare men who had become a legend in his own lifetime. There is little reason for thinking the legend will not continue to thrive indefinitely. As a person, he always seemed to me elusive and perhaps this was his strategy for feeding the legendary shadow that soon became more real than the man himself. If ever a man was the author of his own mythology, Hemingway was that man. We know everything about him except what he was really like. The world will remember him for what he was probably not and one even wonders whether his best stories and novels will outlive the legend.

*

B. sees Rilke’s earlier poems as the struggling shoots of the later brilliant blossomings. Yet he prefers these earlier productions to the Orphean sonnets and the Duino Elegies. I too am fond of these more youthful efforts, but cannot honestly say that I prefer them to the maturer complexities of the elegies and the sonnets. Is there a central meaning in Rilke’s work? If there is, no one seems to have located it. I offered several suggestions, such as his frustration with the imperfectability of man and therefore his creation of angels as symbolic realizations of man’s ideal aspirations. B. disagrees with my contention that the death wish sits at the core of Rilke’s poetry. No, says B., for he was basically a yea-sayer to life. Putting both our thoughts together I would like to believe that it was a fuller life than lay within the limited capacity of mortal man that Rilke sought. Thus it was the enviable state of the angel which he felt certain could only be attained by crossing the line from life into death. When B. calls Rilke a poet of exile he is putting his finger on a more tangible characteristic. The earlier poems were Germanic, yet everything else points to a drifting away from his homeland. Besides being one of the giants of the twentieth century, Rilke seems to represent the cosmopolitan tendencies of our age perhaps more than any other modern poet. There is a sense of urgency in every poem that he wrote. The feeling is sincere and profound. The happy meeting of genius and emotion is everywhere in evidence. If there is a single outstanding feature by which he might be known it is the exquisite atmosphere he envelops you in. He leads you on by implication rather than lucid clarification.

*

Collective crime, collective guilt and the subsequent punishment of a scapegoat is the essential outline which frameworks our method nowadays of dealing out legal justice. It speaks convincingly of the lack of progress in human character since neolithic times. And what is the Biblical “any eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” but a clarification of the mode of life which the authors of the Bible found in existence in their own society. This is retributive justice, bare-faced and unashamed. And is it not much the same with us, except that we are less honest with ourselves than our ancestors were. Admittedly, the killer instinct is universal and, circumstances being equal, who among us could not be turned into a murderer? I don’t say that we could all commit murder under the same set of circumstances, but rather that each man carries his own degree of restraint, a limit beyond which he cannot possibly remain a pacifiist.

I think the whole idea of Christ being crucified for our sins proves a point. Better he should suffer than we should lose a single drop of blood, although we are just as guilty as he. Christ felt his own guilt, being more sensitive no doubt than those around him, probably because he regarded himself as one of the perpetrators of the collective crime. Rather than destroy the collective criminal, mankind, with a deluge such as occurred in Noah’s day, he was chosen to pay the penalty for society’s criminality. The people who punished Christ actually believed only he was guilty and never for a moment thought of themselves as anything but fine, upstanding righteous citizens. The lesson implied is that it took a Christ-like individual to understand the meaning of collective crime and to accept the consequences of his understanding by offering himself as a sacrifice or, hopefully, as the sole bearer of retributive justice that was actually due all mankind. Although he was able to convey his knowledge to a handful of his followers, and how well they grasped the concept is still debatable, he failed to enlighten the mass of men, including those who profess adherence to his teachings today.

Time and again society is confronted with its own guilty conscience through one of its more sensitive members, or perhaps even one who is totally oblivious to the role he is playing, who usually ends up in what commentators view as the scapegoat’s noose. If only society was purified by these crucifixions. But instead, the exact opposite seems to be the case more often than not. The collective crimes grow increasingly vicious, while society concocts new and cleverer slogans day by day to assure itself of its own immaculate superiority.

*

Eyebrows are still raised by Whitman’s frankness. Read him and you know that he was always a lecherous homosexual. Or perhaps the word lecherous connotes the puritan mentality that is passing judgment on him rather than the old gray poet himself. His whole life revolved around his sexual desires, and he preferred being open about them to being hypocritical like most other people. Since his poetry was an accurate reflection of his life, it too bears that stamp of shocking bluntness. He was free and easy, vagabondish, unconfineable, scholastically ignorant, and yet a man of emotional genius, who must have been something of an embarrassment to Emerson. At the root of Thoreau’s admiration I feel certain was envy, envy for a man who was freer than himself, for in the department of sex it appears that Henry lived on an even tighter little island than his fellow Concordites. Whitman trusted more completely in his emotions than any poet of significant stature before or after him. This trust paid off, for it winged him to the very pinnacle of Parnassus. He was neither self-righteous nor self-conscious. Compared to him we are all drastically constricted by a moral malaise of our own construction. This is why he will no doubt always have admirers but never any peers.