Philip Wylie

“ There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom—but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice—and then to learn better and shift the position once again—and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. ”

“ He loved Webster and it deserved his best. His best! He peered again into the celebrating night and wondered what that awful best would be.
He desired passionately to be able to give that—to cover the earth, making men glad and bringing a revolution into their lives, to work himself into a fury and to fatigue his incredible sinews, to end with the feeling of a race well run, a task nobly executed. And, for a year, that ambition had seemed in some small way to be approaching fruition. Now it was turned to ashes. It was not with the muscles of men that his goal was to be attained. ”

“ It was a cold night, but Hugo perspired. Was he to go again into the holocaust to avenge a friend? Was he to live over those crimson seconds that followed the death of Shayne, all because he had helped a blind friend into a camion? He knew that he was not. Never again could his instinct so triumph over his reason. That was the greatest danger in being Hugo Danner. That, he commenced to see, was the explanation of all his suffering in the past. The idea warmed and encouraged him. Henceforth his emotions and sentiments would be buried even deeper than his first inbred caution had buried them. ”

“ Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or—if necessary—by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form—one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire. ”

“ The world was cluttered with these great lumps of incredible architecture. Walls had been builded by primitive man, temples, hanging gardens, obelisks, pyramids, palaces, bridges, terraces, roads—all of them gigantic and all of them defying the penetration of archæology to find the manner of their creation. Was it not possible—Hugo's heart skipped a beat when it occurred to him—that in their strange combination of ignorance and brilliance the ancients had stumbled upon the secret of human strength—his secret! ”

“ I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that—save for individuals—present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony—an operation of the very law I learned—the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility. ”

“ Hugo could not refrain from comparing himself to Valentine Mitchel. An artist—a clever artist and one who would some day be important to the world. Because people could understand what he drew, because it represented a level of thought and expression. He was, like Hugo, in the doldrums of progress. But Mitchel would emerge, succeed, be happy—or at least satisfied with himself—while Hugo was bound to silence, was compelled never to allow himself full expression. Humanity would never accept and understand him. ”

“ Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people—human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be—through every hour of all that is a life—belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. ”

“ Although he was only a few years older than Hugo, he made the latter feel youthful.
They had a brace of drinks, two more and two more. All about them was bedlam, as if the emotions of man had suddenly been let loose to sweep him off his feet. Grief, joy, rage, lust, fear were all obviously there in almost equal proportions.
Shayne extended his hand. "They have something to fight for, at least. Something besides money and glory. A grudge. I wonder what it is that makes me want to get in? I do." ”

“ What the hell do you really believe about it?"
"There is the death wish," I said.
"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain—they want to go on living—and are proud of it."
"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form—in this case, the objective. We want other people to die—to suffer—to bear our load—to take our responsibility. We hate. ”

“ Hugo answered.
They sat down. This was a new emotion—a paradoxical emotion for him. He had come to an inharmonious sanctuary and he could expect both tragedy and enchantment. There was Roseanne herself, a hidden beautiful thing in whom were prisoned many beauties. She was growing old in the frosty seclusion of her husband's company. She was feeding on the toothless food of dreams when her hunger was still strong. That much anyone might see; the reason alone remained invisible. He was acutely conscious of an hour at hand, an imminent moment of vision.
"You're a strange man," she said finally. ”

“ It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct—and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both—looking backward and looking forward. ”

“ All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human—he looked upon them again with repugnance—and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. ”

“ The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.
I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.
A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose. ”