Chapter 1

THE OBSCENE, THE GODLY AND THE STERILE

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We may look at life in many ways. One of the great values of literature and poetry is that it gives us the subjective perspective of the writer and the poet. Science attempts to describe the world in terms of a "social" reality, in the sense that all men can share the experience and understanding of the things about which science speaks; but poetry approaches experience in a different mood, and shows us what the inner man sees, speaking of things in their subjective connotation .

It has seemed to me that when life is sensed poetically there are many separations, poetically inexplicable gaps, apparent in it. It is hard to understand and be really convinced as a matter of feeling, for example, that the warm, protective tenderness of a mother for her child can actually exist in the same world and at the same time with helmeted men lying in the darkness along a Korean battle line, each man consumed by an icy fright and living in the terror and horror of war. Here we see the division of tenderness from savagery and fear. To the extent that we become preoccupied with one, the other seems remote and fictional, a mere make-believe.

Of course, there are other divisions, too. There are as many as there are feelings and their negation. These things may perhaps be easily reconciled mentally by logical explanation, but it strikes me strangely nevertheless that I can watch Artur Rubinstein in Carnegie Hall playing the Emperor Concerto at the very same time that on the other side of the world some jungle savage may be busily shrinking the head of his latest victim.

The more aware we are of these things, the more they seem to be "split realities," separate "existences," "sanities" and "insanities." It is startling the way they are woven together into life, each to a great extent embarrassing and falsifying the other. And I am sometimes a little startled also by the way their coexistence is accepted by many persons to whom life appears so matter-of-factly simple. In this essay I am concerned with one of these splits in our not-so-monolithic reality. This is the split between the personal and the distant; the inner and the outer; the introverted, vital, pulsating life of a man, on the one hand, and his setting in the commonplace here-and-now world, on the other; which is to say, the division between what I will call the "obscene" and the "sterile".

Can there be any real doubt but that all meaningful life, the life that lies deep within a man's personal awareness, is "obscene"?

You should not imagine that in asking this question I am using "obscene" in some strained or over-burdened sense. I mean it just as I have asked it. And the answer to the question must be that the introverted soul of a man, that private elan which sparks in you and me our joy and lust and cleanest intelligence, is in contemporary society (as has apparently been the case in many societies) the hidden and hushed bastard child of ourselves and our associates.

It is driven deep. On the whole we do not wish to see it. More, even, than that: we have blanked it out of our common interchange.

It is not with ceremony that we have buried ourselves in this fashion. It has been with an almost unconscious pretension, only in the most subtle ways hypocritical, that we have refused to acknowledge our own spiritual and mental existence. We have somehow accomplished a repression, a failure to communicate, the most important thoughts and feelings of our lives.

This is the act of hiding that satisfies one-half of any definition of "obscenity".

The other half is to be found in our reaction to any failure to hide. "Obscenity" is a hiding and a begrudging, disgusted, sometimes terrified, admission of the thing's existence if ever it is uncovered. And I may ask to whom I may bare even a fragment of my soul who would not thereby be shocked and dumbfounded, and then probably angry and indignant, at the audacity I have shown in asserting it? Tonight I can't think of a single man or woman who would at this very time enjoy discussing with me Henry Hazlitt's new book refuting the economic doctrines of John Maynard Keynes. If I were to get on the phone now and call someone to suggest it, he would most surely consider even the suggestion laughably odd. The point, though, is that Henry Hazlitt's refutation of Keynes is important to me, an integral part of my life. I have spent two weeks reading it, thinking about it; but to my associates it does not exist. It means nothing that somewhere there may be (as there undoubtedly is) someone whose mind is sufficiently fertilized by Hazlitt's book as to be eager to think about it and share it with me in a fully human discussion. In the overall, scientific sense it is true enough that I am not alone with Hazlitt, but the disconnectedness of these other persons from me deprives me of their effective existence and leaves me alone tonight with my obscene delight in the skill and power of the refutation. My delight is hidden and unspoken; it is unspeakable in the vast presence of those who do not care and do not want to know about it. This combination of silence with the element of unspeakability meets fully the broad meaning of the word "obscene". (I use "obscene" to include more than sexual matters.)

Books are the repository of this obscenity. That is a principal reason they are of such value and offer so much insight. And I sense, even as I begin to write, that this book, as Hazlitt's and most others, is to be obscene. Here the invisible magnitude of my being will take its form. You will know me here if you are careful and warp me if you are not. There is nudity in this. It is the nudity of the human spirit, a nakedness that in its revelation pierces the unreal simplicity and commonplaceness of the here-and-now world, where -- though we must live and breathe there -- a man can only feel that he has little sensible habitation or vital touch. A book exposes any author starkly in the other half of this split reality, the other half that so mutely cries "obscene" when thoughts and feelings are brought forward and disturb its preoccupation with trivia.

This is, of course, a poetic perspective of the type I have mentioned. It is an expression of a sensitivity to the depth and shallowness of human relations, as they weave together to create the fundamental division to which I have referred.

There are dark and turbulent depths inside men, grassy plateaus, and bold peaks stretching out in the sunlight; there is greatness of evil and greatness of good; clear and bright intelligence or the warpings of the disconnected and the irrational; eagerness and ennui. Men are of many shapes. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the writings of Dostoevsky. This is surprisingly apparent whenever one becomes so placed as to see a glimmer of what is going on inside of some other person.

But a service station attendant who cleans your windshield sees none of this. He expects you to be a man of what we might call "ordinary humanity," well understood by all and concerned with the here-and-now. You might well imagine how strange it would be for a man who is expert in international monetary systems and who stops for gas on his way to a meeting of the Federal Reserve Board, to stand by the pump and talk with the attendant about the urgent necessity of raising the rediscount rate to curtail the expansion of bank credit and the swelling of inflation. Instead, this remains contained within him and cannot be expressed in this circumstance. He stands and talks about yesterday's frost and today's ballgame.

In the same way, would it not be strange for the attendant himself to talk about anything other than these trivialities? Let us assume that he is a young man and that his mind has repeated to him over and over again on this particular day a strong desire to see the work day come to an end so that he may leave the station and go out with his girl, so that he may hold and kiss her. The omnipresence of this feeling may course through him while he wipes the windshield, but can you imagine him talking about anything but "yesterday's frost and today's ballgame," the same as does the economist? For both of them the really meaningful reality of their lives is enclosed. Indeed, in the case of the attendant spoken of it is probably obscene in even the most commonly understood sense of that word. The tender (though probably carnal and passionate) imagery running through his mind would, if revealed, shock the economist having his tank filled. And this would be not because such thoughts are unknown to the economist, who has in all likelihood shared them from time to time, but because to each man there is in this situation a commitment to the world of shallowness and objective triviality. Each expects the other to live his part in the objective reality and not to depart from it. A breach, an emergence of the soul of either man, would surprise the other. In this external reality of the here-and-now there is a built-in intolerance, an unwillingness to know the underlying subjective facts. It is one reality, a sphere of existence all its own; the visceral reaction to life, the inner core of sensibility, is yet another reality, split off by itself and fundamentally incommunicable to it.

How alone the soul -- the "obscenity", the inner life of a man -- can be in juxtaposition with the external reality! I feel this strongly, for all that I hear, see and feel, all that is urgent to me in thought and in my flesh, is here in this room, with the tick of the clock, the bookcases filled with the people I know best, the self-portrait serious and determined hanging on the wall. My li£e is here. It is warm and proud, emergent and unclothed. Not much of it is leaking outside on this cold night. The chairs and the walls know me; together we are at peace. The record-player is making Beethoven come alive again and he is with all of his virtuosity giving me a concert of his most sublime music. But his music is obscene, beautifully obscene, because it bares his soul and mine.

Many times between June 1954 and June 1956 I stood on the parade ground at the Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego as one of hundreds of Marines and watched the base marching band walk back and forth in front of the troop formations doing a slow and imperious step. They played a piece of music that I later found to have been derived from Brahms. At such times, with my rifle over my shoulder, I would march in one of the company formations as we passed the reviewing stand, which was placed along the side half-way from each end of the gigantic asphalt field. The music was compelling, the company flags were flying, hundreds of men were marching, including the officers with their pompous strut. And all of this time I would invariably wonder whether any of it was real. Even though I was "a part," so to speak, of the parade, my thoughts were crowded with the usual concerns of my life, with the problems of economics, with concern over the future of liberty in America, or with such things as wonderings concerning the validity of Tolstoy's theory of history. Thoughts such as these remained important to me as the parade went on around and even with me. The parade was one thing, even though I was a part of it; I -- as a human being -- was something else, something quite separate and transcendent.

There is a malignant boast in the Marine Corps that is made by thin corporals with sickly cheeks (they form a type all their own) to privates and Pfc.s and that begins "You had better give your soul to God, because...." It ends in a simple little way that, in deference to good taste, I will not repeat here. The meaning is that, while ones soul "belongs to God", ones body belongs to the Marine Corps, as personified by the corporal doing the speaking. I have thought that this boast (which once you are in the Marine Corps becomes a practical substitute for the motto "Semper Fidelis," which is a fiction presented principally for public consumption) has a striking degree of philosophic acuity. This may be either conscious or unconscious, but it is there just the same. Far more than one would expect, the saying expresses the existence of the two spheres: the soul and the petty, though in this case dangerous, here-and-now. With an ironic humility it recognizes that a man's soul is one thing, and that what the Marine Corps "owns" is something else. The corporal with the sallow cheeks who utters the motto tyrannizes over the here-and-now, and thereby may even lacerate the soul; but he recognizes in his sentence, though perhaps only inadvertently, that the soul is itself private, belongs "to God," so to speak, and is in fact a reality separate from the reality he dominates.

This separation always stood out starkly for me in the Marine Corps. It was there on those days when we would run and run and run, down the street away from the yellow messhall in which we had just eaten lunch, around the small parade ground out near the fence next to the San Diego airport, through the sand of the obstacle course, the "creeping and crawling range," and the bayonet practice area. At such times, my chest was alive with pain and my legs were exhausted. Here, the usurpation was more complete; the running almost absorbed me. But I was alone just the same. It was never really a platoon running. It was seventy-nine other men and I. I was alone, too, at those times when we were all crowded naked into the small shower stalls amid an appalling noise and shouting. We all struggled desperately with one another to finish showering and shaving in the ten minutes before the drill instructor expected us to be lined up silently by our "racks". I was alone in that silence, staring into the fear coming out of the eyes of the egg-shaped head (they had shaved all of our heads) across from me, and during the "stationary double-time" that went on interminably before taps and the darkness of the room finally gave us the only introversive safety and repose of the day.

I had been alone in much the same way a year earlier when I sat at a table in the University Theater at Colorado University debating with four or five other speakers the pro's and con's of Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-Communism. My thoughts, presented there, could hardly have been more obscene to the crowd whose orthodoxy hated the Senator. I was alone among the boos, and among the applause when one of the anti-"mccarthyites" walked out of the theater during my speech. It was a snowy day, befitting the loneliness. I will remember that day a long time: the reality of my consciousness and the icy barbarity of the crowd.

Though it is along somewhat of a different line, I should like to ask you whether you have taken a nap on a Sunday afternoon, after the sunlight has lost its vibrant quality of morning and has created its own sort of timelessness. Invariably (or so it has seemed to me), a dog will bark in the distance. I have often wondered just what place that dog has in my life. Maybe at other times I have seen him, but poetically it would not be the same dog, because that dog is not really a dog at all, but a distant barking. And this distant barking comes in to you on your bed as a far-away reminder that your drowsy half-wakefulness is either unreal and the dog is real, or the drowsiness is real and the barking is unreal. The split between the personal and the distant seems to me to be present in this experience.

Indeed, in all of these instances the private awareness is present, unseen and unseeable.

How more could anything be obscene? The thoughts and vital life of men are hidden. They press for release with great potentialenergy. Upon their release, to the extent they pierce the anesthetic mist of indifference, they produce a response that is variously manifested, as sometimes by blank incomprehension, or disgusted disclaimer, or angry reproach, or -- what is just as empty -- by frivolous compliment. Some of these forms are more open and felt; others are more inchoate, taking a shapelessness that reflects a deep-seated intolerance and revulsion. But so devoid is the extroverted world of true feeling, so little is it the focus of that which is vital, that I doubt that it has any acutely conscious awareness of this revulsion and exclusion. Rarely are the premises of its mentality baldly set forth and proclaimed. I have often thought this empty outer world, indeed, to be an incredible fiction. It ignores basics and so preoccupies itself with irrelevancies that while sensually it is "real", spiritually it is not.

This "extroverted world" of which I speak is the sum total of a man's contacts with living people, after one subtracts the very rare contact that carries significant subjective meaning. It consists in a multitude of trivia: the silent standing among the crowd on a bus or in a subway, lunch with a life insurance salesman, a spilt drink in a cocktail bar, the unending chatter of a nervous woman, a dance with a girl to the cha-cha-cha (provided you are not in love with her, which makes it meaningful), an evening of Ed Sullivan and Gunsmoke, a day of snapping-in on a rifle range, the giving of a paper at most seminars (though I have seen one in which ideas did in fact have significance), a bottle of pop after unloading a truckload of lumber. To a very large extent it consists in the idle talk so characteristic of social relations today (though I do not mean to assert by this that other periods of history necessarily fared better), which forms our meager substitute for good conversation. Even the great bulk of our "closer" acquaintanceships, which unfortunately never seem quite able to penetrate the surface, are a part of it. It is the milieu with which we have contact in our outer-irectedness." The extroverted world is that vast run of life that flows by us, catching us up sometimes in its eddies, a run that is nevertheless essentially impersonal to us, not touching with any great warmth or passion or lingering gentleness the quick of our sensibilities.

This strata of our lives should be an active conduit, bringing to us human stimulation. But somehow we have turned it into a non-conductor. It is the conduit itself that cries “obscene” and suppresses the best of human thought and fee!ing. Simplified shapes are alone qualified for its sight; the private warpings of the human spirit, as the noble elevation of integrity and of fascinated curiosity, the multiplicity of pain and joy, the infinity of the subjective, are not; simultaneously they are hidden from it and repressed by it, neglected and repelled.

Certainly I have said enough to bring home to you the nature of both the "obscenity" and the "sterility" of which I speak. Your own vitalism and sensitivity can surely furnish your mind with examples from your own experience. There is no use belaboring the point, now that it has been sufficiently made. It is enough, in summary, that we recognize the essential "aloneness" of the human spirit, the fact of its being hidden, and the fact that it is repressed by the mechanism of another reality, the reality of the here-and-now. Now that the fact of division has been made clear, we may look a little more closely at each reality, inspecting each in turn.

I have chosen to apply to the extroverted world the label "sterile."

Though it is perhaps an over-simplification, it is nevertheless a fitting label. The man who is preoccupied by this external reality is perpetually like the service station attendant and the economist as they stood talking about "yesterday's frost and today's ballgame." Though such a man is -- by external standards --commonly thought to embody the healthiest normality, he is not truly human at all. He is, as we have seen, but a shadow of humanity, not fully a man. Such a person is a trivial toy of flesh and bone, an irritating creature, who is absorbed with the frivolity and purposelessness of the here-and-now.

Unfertilized and unfertilizing, he abhors the obscenity of fertilization.

If there is any fact that most stands out about this spiritually inert individual, it is his essential dullness. He is poverty-stricken. Would he discuss Hazlitt's refutation of Keynes with me now, or any other time? God forbid! Instead, he is expert in rendering the nonsense of small talk, which -- to give him some credit -- involves the not inconsiderable art of saying nothing over extended periods of time and seeming to be satisfied with himself and with it. He has not studied with fascination the life of the beetle, dug deep for fossils in the crust of the earth, made the world come alive through the intensity of his own interest in it. Plainly, he is dull. He is dull as he watches his television set hour after hour until at last bedtime catches him by the hand and leads him toward another day. He is dull at dinner; dull even when he is witty and talkative. He is dull in his keen awareness of trivia and his total abstinence from profundity.

Of course, I realize I am going pretty far in my condemnation. I am talking, to some extent, in abstraction, about a type of person who does not, nor cannot, exist in all his purity. I should imagine that it is impossible to become entirely absorbed by extroversion. It seems more likely that all human beings are saved at least partly from this sterility by some "abnormality," some obscenity, some particle of real humanity. If nothing else, a man's sexuality saves him, drives him into the obscene, out of the dullness and into life. Thanks to it he feels some tenderness, passion, and yearning, ambition, despair and ecstasy. And there are other redeeming forces, too. Life is so full of interest that even the most extroverted man must have a hard time ignoring it. At the very least he is bound to catch hold of some aspect of life and, childlike, examine it closely. And when he does he automatically loses some of his dullness. His curiosity and the process of its satisfaction make him reflect the interestingness of the part of the world that has thus become his. To this extent he has become humanized, because he has delved into the separate reality of his own mind and consciousness. And even to some extent he is able to bring this humanization into the fabric of his extroversion. Thereby the extroverted reality is saved from a total sterility. It does in some ways carry with it things of interest. (Even the trivia it rehashes would be interesting if one did not become so tired of them.)

But these qualifications do not obliterate the fact that it is quite dull, even though it is not dull with all the purity with which a mathematician might define a line or a point.

These saving features are not so strong that one can concede to the man who is absorbed by the extroversive reality more than a mere sub-humanity. One can only feel that much of civilization as we know it is only a stage in the development of man (assuming for the moment an historic progression for the better), that it is not fully emergent by any means, that it is not altogether above the barbarism that we pride ourselves with having dispelled, when we indulge in the usual naive conceit of our modernism. In so saying, I do not intend to slight the remarkable achievements men thusfar have attained. As Ayn Rand has made so clear in an unforgettable scene near the end of her Atlas Shrugged, itself a work of great mind and spirit, a railroad engine embodies within it the accumulated intelligence of thousands of years, an intelligence that greatly distinguishes our civilization from barbarism. But this achievement has been the product of our obscenities, our vitalisms. We cannot thank our sterility and dullness for it. To the vast extent that our lives are absorbed by the sterile and the dull, we are not fully emergent.

You will see, then, that I am in favor of the "obscene", the hidden underworld of life, where the unusurped man exists in a private realm of pulsating, vital response, where ideas are important, where there are values and perspectives and an intensity of feeling. Such a non-preoccupation with trivia is an enormous realm, hardly definable at all except as everything that is not empty, not void, not frivolous. A thinker whose mind is pressing and vigorous can peer out into an infinity of interest and fascination. Corporeal and located so finitely himself, he is like Faust in his Gothic study and the expansiveness of his mind can encompass ages and great truths, or take hold of a tiny particle of existence, as does diminutive oriental art, and find in it all the beauty and wonder that is reflected in larger things. The sense of wonder is the key. And with this sense the mind knows no bounds. This is especially true, believe it or not, with the critical mind, which appreciates the limits of knowledge and exercises carefully the methods that a wise skepticism imposes. His is the world of conquest and real adventure, a bloodless assault, with all the attendant invigoration. This is a soaring, where a man gives natural expression to his humanity, his reason, and his sensitivity. And the one prerequisite, above all others, is the willingness to cultivate ones spirit, the non-blanking out of mind and soul through the day-to-day exercise of thought and sensibility. Above all, it requires the use of time and the solitude of ones awareness as an instrument of self-cultivation.

I must make a qualification here, too. Introversion is a harbor for the soul. In fact, it is the expression of the soul as it exists pure and unusurped. And along the line of this metaphor we ought to remark that a harbor may be beautiful, as a quiet harbor in the South Seas, or it may be cluttered, nervous and foul, as a swarming oriental harbor. Not just any soul will do; not just any thought or feeling will suffice. Just as material well-being is itself only a precondition to happiness, necessary perhaps but certainly not sufficient, so also is the obscene a necessary part of a truly human man, without being sufficient, at least when we take "obscene" generically. The genus "obscene" is not pin-pointed enough. Praise and awe befit only the proper species of obscenity, for only a rational, inquisitive, magnificent soul, mixed with the flesh-and-bone awareness so craved by the Spanish philosopher Unamuno and with a passionate sense of touch and sexuality so well described by D. H. Lawrence, is the truly human soul, alive and pulsing, proud and self-affirming. Only such a man can say, with Ayn Rand, "I am the man who loves his life."

You may think I am describing greatness, when in fact I have chosen the word "human" to characterize this living man, who loves himself, and "sub-human" to describe all others who cannot boast within themselves this cleanliness of pride. Perhaps in a perverse world it is greatness that I mean. But I cannot persuade myself that what is so natural and right, so easy and so rewarding, is greatness. It does not require superior gifts and a flash of brilliance. It is just a full blooming of human life, a natural coming of summer. So deeply rooted is the subversion of this spirit that we have come to regard this summer as a rare elevation, while the rest of mankind, so to speak, lies steeped in the varied insanities of an eternal winter. It is only a part of the perversion itself to so regard it.

"Godliness!" -- finite and incorporated in a man who knows that someday he will die: is this not the most natural state of a real man? Alive and heroic. Standing on his two legs that bear him toward the sky.

Is this not the proper conception of man? Is it the sterile that must sap our strength, while we – in an unbelievable depravity -- award it a place as our natural condition?

Men and women, where they exist, must know the answer.

[Note in 2001: At almost no later time in my life would I have been able to write as passionately or as poetically as I did in the chapter just finished. It was written in 1959, and to read it now, after 42 years, gives me a chill of embarrassment because I was so honestly declaring my inner feelings. But, of course, this embarrassment is the very fact of “obscenity” I was describing. There is nothing in my later thought or experience that would cause me to want to change anything about the chapter, even though a wonderful marriage has caused me to settle into a certain tolerance for everyday life, channelizing my intellectual and artistic life into the sanctuary of my own writing and art.

The passion of this chapter does not exclude analytical power. A reader may, however, like to read my less passionate analysis of the extroversion-introversion split in my chapter on “The Causes of the Alienation” in my later book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]

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