Nonconformity Read Free Page B

if he wished to …?” 40
    Their names are those of certain nighttime notions, held too tightly, that would not ever have been conceived had there been someone in the night to hold instead.
    And do their time cheerfully enough when trapped—thirty days or sixty or ninety without a hangover of guilt. The little man in the business suit who wouldn’t steal a dime if you put it in his pocket carries around a heavier load of guilt these days than do the people of the twilight. When the latter take a fall they come out ready to say, “I paid for that one,” for they feel they have. But the business suit, when he is finished paying in full for everything, is plagued by the feeling that there’s something unpaid for yet. So he goes to a twenty-dollar-an-hour analyst who feels guiltier than he does. Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt.
    It is the hapless, useless, helpless goof-ups who’d rather play a juke all day than get into the rat race for fameand fortune, who go guiltless. The tricked, the maimed and the tortured who do the little deeds. And never lie down to rest. For they sense that the guilt is elsewhere.
    The caves of their country are the acres and acres of furnished rooms as well as the railroad hotels of the small-town slums; on the dim-lit streets behind the bright-lit boulevards as on the rutted roads behind Main Street; in the chicken-wire flops as in the all-steel cells with the solid doors; backroom brothels as in back-street bars; in the courts and the wards and the charity hospitals; in all the dens and all the dives wherein we see and touch the bone and flesh out of which our time is forged at last.
    Down in the alley battleways behind the billboards with the painted smiles.
    There, accustomed to taking daily strolls along the unterraced edge of utter disaster, long used to being booted gratuitously by the hindquarters of destruction, here at last are all those, in Dostoevsky’s phrase, for whom nobody prays: the ones whose defeats cost everything of real value, and yet whose laughter cuts closest to the bone.
    Leaving scar-tissue enough to satisfy Ilsa Koch.
    In the horse-and-wagon alleyways of the littered hinterland behind the editorials. The street that stenography so often reports yet never can touch without flinching. The unswept streets where most of humanity has always lived.
    Yet, in suggesting that the true climate of the human condition on the home grounds may best be gaugedunderground, I’m referring not only to a sociological strata but to a psychological condition as well: all those so submerged emotionally that they are unable to belong to the world in which they live.
    “To regard the universe as one’s own,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “one must belong to the caste of the privileged; it is for those alone who are in command to justify the universe by changing it, by thinking about it, by revealing it …” 41 To know oneself one must belong to the world.
    It is therefore possible to live underground even while skiing at Aspen or Sun Valley. You don’t have to live in an alley to be submerged.
    Although, come to think of it, that does seem as good a way as any of going about it.

I
was in penal servitude, and I saw “desperate” criminals. I repeat, this was a hard school. Not one of them ceased to consider himself a criminal. To look at, they were a dreadful and cruel lot. However, only the simpletons and newcomers were “braggarts,” and these used to be ridiculed. Mostly, they were gloomy, pensive people. No one spoke about his crimes. I never heard any grumbling. It was even impossible to speak aloud about one’s crimes. Now and then someone would utter a word with a challenge and a twist—and all the inmates, as one man, would “put a check on” the pert fellow. It was a rule not to speak about this. Nevertheless, I believe, probably not one among them evaded long psychic suffering within himself—that suffering that is the most purifying and