The Union Jack Read Free Page A

quite impossible to imagine such a scene. It is impossible to imagine how a grown-up man, well into his forties, who eats with a knife and fork, wears a necktie, speaks the language of the educated middle class and, as senior editor-in-chief, can lay claim to unreserved trust in his faculty of judgement; impossible to imagine how such a man, unless he were drunk or had suddenly gone off his rocker, could all at once wallow in the mire of his own fear and, amid spasms of twitching, squawk streams of such patent nonsense; impossible to imagine such a situation occurring, or rather, since it did occur, impossible to imagine how such a situation could have occurred; and inthe end, it is impossible to imagine the situation itself, the scene and all of its details: that group huddled together facing the ranting buffoon, our group of adult men and women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties and seventies, reporters, stenographers, typists, technicians of every sort, who listened in consternation, with earnest-looking faces and without a single objection, to those near-meaningless ravings that belied all common sense, reason and moderation by their self-negating anger, their veritable paroxysm of self-negation. Let me reiterate: the question of the credibility or incredibility of the words and the accusations—words more fitting to a pulp thriller and accusations reminiscent of mediaeval chronicles of heresy, which went far beyond the orbit of critical judgement—did not so much as cross my mind at the time, for who could have made any judgement there, apart from those who did the judging? What sort of truth would I have been able to perceive there, aside from the truth of that ludicrous and, in essence, childish scene; oh yes, aside from the truth that anybody might be carried off, at any time, in a black limousine, aside from that, in essence, again plain childish, bogeyman-truth? Let me reiterate: the only thing perceived by that stupefied, irresolute, twenty-year-oldyoung man (I), torn between unremitting horror and an unremitting itch to laugh, was that the person who only yesterday had still been a bigwig there was today fit only to be abused with the names of canine predators and to be taken off anywhere, at any time, in a black limousine—in other words, all that he (I) perceived was a lack of permanence. And now, before that friendly gathering which had been urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, I was unexpectedly moved to declare that maybe morality (in a certain sense) is nothing more than permanence, and maybe people create states which can be designated as lacking in permanence for no other reason than to prevent a state of morality from being established. If this declaration, uttered at the dining table, may of course seem exceptionally slipshod, and probably, indeed in all certainty, untenable under the much more considered circumstances of writing, I still maintain that there does exist at least a close connection between
seriousness
and permanence. For death—if we constantly prepare for it in the course of life as the true, indeed, as a matter of fact, sole task that awaits us; if we rehearse for it, so to speak, in the course of life; if we learn to see it as a solution, an ultimately reassuring, if not satisfying, solution—is a serious matter. Butthe brick that happens, by chance, to drop right on our head is not serious. The hangman is not serious. And yet, oddly, even someone who has no fear of death fears the hangman. All I intend by all this is to describe, inadequately as it may be, my state, my state as it was then. The fact that, on the one hand, I was afraid, while, on the other, I was laughing, but above all, in some sense, I was confused, or I might even say I reached a crisis point, lost the refuge of my formulations; my life, maybe due to a quickening of tempo or
dynamics
, had become ever more unformulable, hence the sustainability of my way of life ever more