on the hills. My bitch found her. She said she had a giddy spell, and couldn’t rightly remember what happened. I fetched her home. She was fairly done in. But we gave her a drop o’ whisky in milk, and she perked up. Oh,” he told me, when I asked, “about a week or so back. I wouldn’t take on. I’ve had the cows a-dying on their four legs and when the time comes they drop their calves and they lick ’em and up they get and look around for a bull.”
I bought more drink. By now Jim seemed a bit the better for it. “And talking about bulls,” he went on, with a face so expressionless that it might have been cut in wood, “that other young lady you had down—the one with the yellow hair—she was a brash one, sir, if I may say so. She comes to me in the shed—you’ll not mind my telling you—I’m there with William, the young brown bull—and she talks to me like this. ‘Jim, tell me, are you frightened of the bull?’ And ‘Jim, tell me, how many cows does he serve?’ She stands in the mud and stares at the bull. William, he doesn’t take kindly to strangers. But she goes up to him and takes his horn in her hand. I tell you I was taken aback a bit. So I take her away from William. ‘But Jim,’ she says, ‘what I’ve always wanted to know is how you geld ’em.’ She asks me do I use scissors or knives or what. And when I tell her, pincers, she says, ‘Pincers. You clip the strings like wire.’ And she walks away from us.” Jim finished off his beer without looking at me to see what effect his story had had upon me: largely, I suppose, because he knew me quite well enough to take my concurrence for granted.
“Did you like her?” I asked, searching for a meaningless remark.
He smiled. “She was the prettiest face I ever saw in this valley,” he said, and got more drink from the bar.
* * * *
I find continually that, in telling this story, it is not so much a sequence of events that I have to relate, as the evolution of emotions within emotions within events. For it is the emotion engendered by any one event that decides, by a sort of episodic parentage, the nature of the events that will ensue from its existence. The gratified duplicity we feel when we execute our first adept deception is the source of our second and more adept deception. The hedonists in us, O God, will tear us to pieces—and not for their delight, but for our own. And the perplexity in all this complexity is that puzzled suspension of criticism to which unthinking sentimentalists give the term, the love of life. For, in truth, this elaborately complicated machine, the existential engine, in which emotions evolve behaviour which in turn evolves emotions wholly unpredictable from any of their precedents—in which the origin of actions can be simply the passion to encompass their own eventual destruction—this machine, like an engine made of glass, shows us exactly how the rose leaf and the bus ticket we insert at one end, may emerge, after heaven knows what metamorphoses, as history, or the will to power, or the poems of Paul Verlaine at the other.
* * * *
The deep sea monsters stir in the abysses of their misery and, clasping their tentacles about each other, copulate without knowing it: thus, in obedience to the laws of zoology, I, no less the son of their ignorance than my son is of my knowledge, stir, so many generations later, and love in the depths of my misery. Sweet Pascal, I think that you were wrong: because we know that we suffer we are, as I see it, lesser than the animals. For the degree of our suffering is the degree of our deviation from the divine will. Every twist of the snake as it kills gesticulates to the glorification of God: does every desire I undergo degrade Him? Physical love is a sin because there, and not in the arguments of atheists, god has been rendered unnecessary: in the centre of the ovum is the atheistical void. To redeem our immersion in this void we are destined to
I bought more drink. By now Jim seemed a bit the better for it. “And talking about bulls,” he went on, with a face so expressionless that it might have been cut in wood, “that other young lady you had down—the one with the yellow hair—she was a brash one, sir, if I may say so. She comes to me in the shed—you’ll not mind my telling you—I’m there with William, the young brown bull—and she talks to me like this. ‘Jim, tell me, are you frightened of the bull?’ And ‘Jim, tell me, how many cows does he serve?’ She stands in the mud and stares at the bull. William, he doesn’t take kindly to strangers. But she goes up to him and takes his horn in her hand. I tell you I was taken aback a bit. So I take her away from William. ‘But Jim,’ she says, ‘what I’ve always wanted to know is how you geld ’em.’ She asks me do I use scissors or knives or what. And when I tell her, pincers, she says, ‘Pincers. You clip the strings like wire.’ And she walks away from us.” Jim finished off his beer without looking at me to see what effect his story had had upon me: largely, I suppose, because he knew me quite well enough to take my concurrence for granted.
“Did you like her?” I asked, searching for a meaningless remark.
He smiled. “She was the prettiest face I ever saw in this valley,” he said, and got more drink from the bar.
* * * *
I find continually that, in telling this story, it is not so much a sequence of events that I have to relate, as the evolution of emotions within emotions within events. For it is the emotion engendered by any one event that decides, by a sort of episodic parentage, the nature of the events that will ensue from its existence. The gratified duplicity we feel when we execute our first adept deception is the source of our second and more adept deception. The hedonists in us, O God, will tear us to pieces—and not for their delight, but for our own. And the perplexity in all this complexity is that puzzled suspension of criticism to which unthinking sentimentalists give the term, the love of life. For, in truth, this elaborately complicated machine, the existential engine, in which emotions evolve behaviour which in turn evolves emotions wholly unpredictable from any of their precedents—in which the origin of actions can be simply the passion to encompass their own eventual destruction—this machine, like an engine made of glass, shows us exactly how the rose leaf and the bus ticket we insert at one end, may emerge, after heaven knows what metamorphoses, as history, or the will to power, or the poems of Paul Verlaine at the other.
* * * *
The deep sea monsters stir in the abysses of their misery and, clasping their tentacles about each other, copulate without knowing it: thus, in obedience to the laws of zoology, I, no less the son of their ignorance than my son is of my knowledge, stir, so many generations later, and love in the depths of my misery. Sweet Pascal, I think that you were wrong: because we know that we suffer we are, as I see it, lesser than the animals. For the degree of our suffering is the degree of our deviation from the divine will. Every twist of the snake as it kills gesticulates to the glorification of God: does every desire I undergo degrade Him? Physical love is a sin because there, and not in the arguments of atheists, god has been rendered unnecessary: in the centre of the ovum is the atheistical void. To redeem our immersion in this void we are destined to
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