The Book And The Brotherhood

one! He's quite capable of it! But this volume will take a lot of digesting. I didn't know one of them could produce such a book now.'

`Who are 'they'?'

`Oh Marxists, neo-Marxists, revisionists, whatever they call themselves. I don't know whether Crimond is 'really' a Marxist, or what that means now, they don't know themselves. I suppose he's a sort of maverick Marxist, as their best thinkers are. The only good Marxist is a mad Marxist. It's not enough to be a revisionist, you've got to ^be a bit mad too- to be able to see the present world, to imagine the magnitud,.I what's happening.'

`Well, I always said he was mad,' said Rose, 'and if the book is entirely wrong-headed -'

^Yes, it is – but one has got to understand -'

Crimond believes in one-party government – one doesn’t have to go any farther than that.'

`Well, he does and he doesn't – his argument is mush larger -'

`I should think,' said Rose, 'that there is nothing larger than that matter.'

`Oh Rose, Rose!' Gerard suddenly reached his hand across the table and seized hers. 'What a lovely answer.' She held onto his warm dear hand which mattered so much more than any book, more than the fate of democratic government, moic than the fate of the human race. 'But, my dear Rose, we have to think, we have to fight, we have to move, we can't stand still, everything is moving so fast -'

`You mean technology? Is Crimond's book about technology?'

`Yes, but as I said it's about everything. He said to me ages ago that he just had to do it all for himself, to explain the whole of philosophy to himself, alone. And that's what he's done, the preSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, right up to the present, and Eastern philosophy too – and that means morality, religion, art, it all comes in, there's a splendid chapter on Augustine, and he writes so well, it's funny and witty, all sorts of people will read it -'

`But if it's all wrong that seems rather a pity!'

`Yes. It could enflame a lot of thoughtless smashers. He thinks liberal democracy is done for. He's a sort of pessimistic utopian. And of course we're right, all right I'm right, and he's wrong – but my rightness – needs to be changed – shaken, uprooted, replanted, enlightened…'

`I think this book will be a nine days' wonder,' said Rose, `and then we can all relax! Even you may feel a bit more normal tomorrow morning. You're drunk on whisky and Crimond!' 1t may be that it's directed simply at me.'

`Surely you don't think -?' There may be a small number of `I don't mean literally. The people who will understand the book and be ready for it, and they are the people it is for – some will agree, some will disagree, but they'll have received an _important communication. It may be like a signal by heliograph – there's only one point where it's received, and there it's dazzling.'

`It's dazzled you anyway. But if it's all about Plato and Augustine and Buddha I can't see it as a political bombshell.' `It's not all about – it's an attempt to see the whole of our civilised past in relation to the present and the future, it's pointed, as it were, at the revolution.'

`Oh that! Oh really!'

`Rose, I don't mean the proletarian revolution out of old-fashioned Marxism. I mean the whole human global revolution.'

`I didn't know there was one. Neither did you. You've just picked it up out of Crimond's book!'

`My dear!' Gerard began to laugh crazily, pouring himself out some more whisky.

`You're drunk. You said I was. Now we both are.'

`My dear girl, yes, I'm drunk, and I didn't 'pick up' out of Crimond's book something which of course I knew before, but which I now see in a new light.'

`It's an illusion. Everything is just a muddle. That's what liberal democracy means.'

`Rose, you see, you understand. But a popular illusion is a great force – and even the maddest prediction can reveal things one hadn't dreamt of which are really there.'

`What do you mean, technology, Africa, nuclear war -?'

`Many many things which seem separate but are connected or will connect. The foundations are shifting, we're about to see the largest, deepest, fastest change, the most shattering revolution, in the history of civilisation.'

`I don't believe those things connect,' said Rose, 'that's mythology. I'm surprised at you! We have a lot of different problems with different solutions. Anyway, dear Gerard, we shall not see this exciting cataclysm. I hope and believe that iii what remains of my lifetime I shall still be able to go out ait, I buy half a pound of butter and a copy of The Times.'

`Who knows? Think what's happened already in our lives.'

`Hitler?'

`Yes, unpredictable, unimaginable things. Space travel. We are surrounded by a future we can't conceive of. We're like those natives in New Zealand who just went on fishing because they couldn't see Captain Cook's ship – there it was in the bay, but they couldn't conceptualise it.'

`I like that. But what you can't know you can't know.'

`Rose, human life is too short, not just that it's sad to spend so little time at the play, but it's too short for serious thinking-thinking needs a long training, a long discipline, a long concentration – even geniuses must have felt they were tiring too soon, giving up when they'd just begun to understand philosophy, perhaps human history, would be quite different if we all lived to be two hundred.'

`Our lives are quite long enough to have some fun, do some work, love a few people and try to be good.'

`Yes, yes, but we've got to, some of us have got to, try to think about what's happening, and to_,fight -'

`Against what?'

`Against – how can I put it – against history. All right, this sounds crazy – Rose, it's so difficult, I can't even pick it up yet – I feel like I felt in my first term of philosophy at Oxford, as if I were crawling round and round a slippery sphere and couldn't get inside.'

`Why bother to get inside? That might have been worth trying when you were a student, but why bother now?'

`You mean – well, yes, I was too young then – perhaps I'm too old now – that thought hurts terribly.'

`I don't mean to hurt you.'

`You're pouring on cold water, buckets and buckets of it, but that's right, one must be cool, one must be cold -'

`I don't understand. Is Crimond on the side of history?'

`Yes. History as a slaughterhouse, history as a wolf that wanders outside in the dark, an idea of history as something

that has to be, even if it's terrible, even if it's deadly.'

`I thought Marxists were optimists who thought the perfect society would soon emerge everywhere as the victory of socialism.'

`They used to be. Some still are, others are haggard with fear but hanging on. Crimond thinks we must purify our ideas with visions of utopia during a collapse of civilisation which he thinks is inevitable.'

`And looks forward to, no doubt! He's a determinist, as they all are.'

`He's a black determinist, that's the most dangerous and attractive kind. Marxism as despair, and as the only possible instrument of thought, the only philosophy that will be ready to look after a period of unavoidable authoritarian government.'

`And as the ark carrying the new values. All the old bourgeois ones will be extinct.'

`He's trying to grasp the whole problem – Of course I don't agree -'

`I don't think there is a whole problem, or that we can imagine the future, no one in the past managed it.'

`I can't convey it, the book is a huge interconnected argument, and it's not just pessimistic – it's very utilitarian, that's always been the nicest part of Marxism! It's about everything – there's a lot about ecology and kindness to animals -'