'
'And you've come up with something?'
'Well, I told you last night the poetry rang a bell. 'Rintah roars and
shakes his fires in the burden'd air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.'
As soon as I saw it I said to myself, 'Ira, that's from something
William Blake wrote.' You see, when I was in college for that one year,
my major was literature. I had to write a paper on Blake.
Twenty-five years ago. You see what I mean about garbage in my head? I
remember the most useless things. Anyway this morning I bought the
Erdman edition of Blake's poetry and prose. Sure enough, I found those
lines in 'The Argument,' part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Do
you know Blake?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'He was a mystic and a psychic.'
'Clairvoyant?'
'No. But with a psychic bent. He thought men had the power to be gods.
For an important part of his career he was a poet of chaos and
cataclysm-and yet he was fundamentally a table-pounding optimist. Now,
do you remember the line the Butcher printed on the bedroom door?
'Yes. 'A rope over an abyss.'
'Do you have any idea what that's from?'
'None.'
'Neither did I. My head is full of garbage. There's no room for
anything important. And I'm not a well educated man. Not well educated
at all. So I called a friend of mine, a professor in the Department of
English at Columbia. He didn't recognize the line either but he passed
it around to a few of his colleagues. One of them thought he knew it.
He got a concordance of the major philosophers and located the full
quotation. 'Man is rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a
rope over an abyss.'
'Who said it?'
'Hitler's favorite philosopher.'
'Nietzsche.'
'You know his work?'
In passing.'
'He believed men could be gods-or at least that certain men could be
gods if their society allowed them to grow and exercise their powers. He
believed mankind was evolving toward godhood- You see, there's a
superficial resemblance between Blake and Nietzsche. That's why the
Butcher might quote both of them. But there's a problem, Graham.'
'What's that?'
'Blake was an optimist all the way. Nietzsche was a raving pessimist.
Blake thought mankind had a bright future.
Nietzsche thought mankind should have a bright future, but he believed
that it would destroy itself before the Supermen ever evolved from it.
Blake apparently liked women. Nietzsche despised them. In fact, he
thought women constituted one of the greatest obstacles standing between
man and his climb to godhood. You see what I'm getting at?'
'You're saying that if the Butcher subscribes to both Blake and
Nietzsche's philosophies, then he's a schizophrenic.'
