Philip Wylie

“ 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. ”

“ The colonel nerved himself for the return passage. Worse than being born—so far as he could remember. Dragging a placenta of parachute and harness through an aluminum canal with an atomic bomb beneath. He gave the three gunners his smile and they did not know it was—this time—a smile of fighting himself. At any rate, he thought, after one more crawl through eternity he could stay in the control compartment, forward. Unless Sopho wanted him.
He took hold of the ladder, sighted through the black tube to freedom's eye at the far end—and his blood turned to water. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instinct is the immortal property—the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish—without much individual hesitation. But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here—or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. ”

“ By now—we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. ”

“ In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress—a scattered, inconsequential number—vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure—five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions—which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides—which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying. ”

“ Ricky and I haven't owned a radio for years—except one that sneaked into the house in a record-player and we didn't even notice we had that, for eight months. A man in this world encounters more than he can bear of the sort of thing that radio purveys; it is Heaven's own mercy if he can avoid a part of it. The printed ads and the billboards get you willy-nilly; and second-class mail is always fooling you. You are eternally exposed to entertainment by chumps in the flesh. ”

“ For the ordeal of biopsy, whatever it might be, I summoned my meager contempt. A long experience of surgery is a poor indoctrination for each new need of it. Ringed about with sadists in white suits, with sterile techniques, with inquisitional steel, I have been too often the Exposed Nerve. I do not hope much, any more—and only defy so [Pg 7] long as I am able. This artificial pose, garnished with calm and with smiling, is what some men call courage, and others dignity, but no man in his right mind evokes without cost: we are the hateful survivors of our sciences. ”

“ The natural urge to live through his species, through kids—to love, that is—to be man's father—is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."
"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."
"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. ”

“ If you wished for the future—and were given it—you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.
Physicists feel this way—and rightly—concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields—ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives. ”

“ I believe that future men should be left free to make up their minds without consulting any bulls and fiats from me. I get some sense of orientation, a raison d'être, from giving thought to the rights of the species now and to come. Not saving adult souls for present bliss—or spiritual cradle-snatching, either—but forwarding the whole, rolling business of biology on this sin-drenched planet, is the fun—for me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only—being egoists—blind to the basic laws of instinct—we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in. ”