His Master's Voice Read Free

mocking caricature of itself, and it writhed in that mockery. I had only one choice: either to be destroyed with her or to jeer at her. As a coward, then, I chose the laughter of betrayal.
    I cannot say whether it really was this way. The first paroxysm of giggling seized me at the sight of the destruction; perhaps the experience would have skipped me had my mother met her end in a fashion more aesthetic, like quietly falling asleep, a form that is much favored by people. It was not like that, however, and, forced to believe my own eyes, I proved defenseless. In earlier times a chorus of hired mourners, brought in quickly, would have drowned out the groans of my mother. But the decline of tradition has reduced magical measures to the level of hairdressing, because the undertaker—and I overheard this—suggested to my father the various facial expressions into which her frozen grimace could be reworked. My father left the room then, and for a brief moment I felt a tremor of solidarity, because I understood him. Later I thought of that mortal agony many times.
    The idea of my laughter as a betrayal seems incomplete. Betrayal is the result of conscious decision, but what causes us to be drawn to destruction? What black hope, in destruction, beckons man? Its utter inutility rules out any rational explanation. This hunger has been suppressed in vain by numerous civilizations. It is as irrevocably a part of us as two-leggedness. To him who seeks a reason but cannot abide any hypothesis of a design, whether in the form of Providence or of the Diabolical, there remains only the rationalist's substitute for demonology—statistics. Thus it is from a darkened room filled with the smell of corruption that the trail leads to my mathematical anthropogenesis. With the formulae of stochastics I strove to undo the evil spell. But this, too, is only conjecture, therefore a self-defensive reflex of the mind.
    I know that what I am writing here could be, with slight shifts in emphasis, turned to my favor—and that some future biographer will try to do this. He will show that with intellect I conquered my character, achieved a great victory, but defamed myself out of a desire to do penance. Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles: that construction speaks to us, because it is aesthetic. He converted the pastoral model into one that was grotesque, unaware that he remained a prisoner of aesthetics. It was as if the purpose had been to replace the opera, in anthropology, with tragicomedy.
    Let my posthumous biographer not trouble himself. I require no apologia; all my effort was born of curiosity, untouched by any feeling of guilt. I wanted to understand—only to understand, nothing more. For the disinterestedness of evil is the only support, in man, for the theological argument; theology answers the question where does a quality come from that has its origin neither in nature nor in culture. A mind immersed totally in the human experience, and therefore anthropocentric, might finally agree with the image of Creation as a somewhat sick joke.
    It is an attractive idea, that of a Creator who merely amused Himself, but here we enter into a vicious circle: we imagine Him sadistic not because He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way. Meanwhile the utter insignificance and smallness of man vis-à-vis the Universe, of which science informs us, makes the Manichean myth a concept so primitive as to be trivial. I will put it in another way: if a creation were to take place—which personally I cannot conceive—then the level of knowledge that it would require would be of such an order that there would be no place in it for silly jokes. Because—and this really is the whole credo of my faith—nothing like the wisdom of evil is possible. My reason tells me that a creator cannot be a petty scoundrel, a