Aunt Dan & Lemon by Wallace Shawn.
Title: Aunt Dan & Lemon.
Author: Wallace Shawn.
Genre: Fiction, play.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1985.
Summary: The play takes the reader into the world of a young recluse named Lemon (alias Leonora) who spends her nights reading chronicles of Nazi atrocities. Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small hour at the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even when they lead to murder. On the Context of the Play is an essay in which the author looks at the way morality functions in the world and individual lives, and both the temptation and the folly of giving up on the concept by accepting the faulty logic that all humans are vile anyway.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My Review:
♥ Lemon: Lately I've been reading about the Nazi killing of the Jews instead. There are a lot of books about the Nazi death camps. I was reading one last night about the camp called Treblinka. In Treblinka, according to the book, they had these special sheds where the children and women undressed and had their hair taken off, and then they had a sort of narrow outdoor passageway, lined by fences, that led from these sheds all the way out to the gas chambers, and they called that passageway the Road to Heaven. And when the children an women were undressing in the sheds, the guards addressed them quite politely, and what the guards said was that they were going to be taken outside for a shower and disinfection-which happens to be a phrase you read so often in these books, again and again, "a shower and disinfection." "A shower and disinfection." The guards told them that they didn't need to be worried about their clothes at all, because very soon they would be coming back to this very same room, and no one would touch their clothes in the meanwhile. But then once the women and children stepped out of the sheds onto the Road to Heaven, there were other guards waiting for them, and those guards used whips, and the women and children were made to run rapidly down the road and all the way into the chambers, which were tiled with orange and white tiles and looked like showers, but which were really killing chambers. And then the doors would be slammed shut and the poison would be pumped in until everyone was dead, twenty minutes later, or half an hour later. So apparently the Nazis had learned that it was possible to keep everyone calm and orderly when they were inside the sheds, but that as soon as they found themselves outside, naked, in that narrow passage, they instinctively knew what was happening to them, and so guards were stationed there with whips to reduce the confusion to a sort of minimum. The strategy was to deal with them politely for as long as possible, and then to use whips when politeness no longer sufficed. Today, of course, the Nazis are considered dunces, because they lost the war, but it has to be said that they managed to accomplish a great deal of what they wanted to do. They were certainly successful against the Jews.
♥ Lemon: So the fact is that I spend a lot of time just staring into space. And you know, when you do that, all of your memories come right back to you, and each day you remember a bit more about them. Of course I haven't lived much of a life, and I would never say I had. Most of my "sex," if you can call it that, has been with myself. And so many of my experiences have had to do with being sick, like visiting different doctors, falling down on my face in public buildings, throwing up in hallways in strange places, and things like that. So in a way I'm sitting here living in the past, and I don't really have much of a past to live in.
♥ Lemon: And you know, people talk about life as if the only things that matter are your own experiences, the things you saw or the things you did or the things that happened to you. But you see, to me that's not true. It's not true at all. To me what matters really is the people you knew, the things you learned from them, the things that influenced you deeply and made you what you are. So I may not have done very much in my life. And yet I really feel I've had a great life, because of what I've learned from the people I knew.
♥ Lemon: And then there are the things that happened to other people, but they're mine now. They're my memories.
♥ Mindy: When company's amusing, any wine is good.
♥ Lemon: And it was in that little house, whenever Aunt Dan would come to visit our family, that she and I would have our evening talks, and when I look back on my childhood, it was those talks which I remember more than anything else that ever happened to me. And particularly the talks we had the summer I was eleven years old, which was the last time my parents and Aunt Dan were friends, and Aunt Dan stayed with us for the whole summer, and she came to visit me every night. And in a way it was an amazing thing that a person like Aunt Dan would spend all that time talking to an eleven-year-old child who wasn't even that bright, talking about every complicated subject in the world, but listening to Aunt Dan was the best, the happiest, the most important experience I'd ever had. (Pause.) Of course, Aunt Dan wasn't really my aunt. She was one of the youngest Americans to ever teach at Oxford-she was just a couple of years older than my parents-and she was my father's best friend, and my mother's too, and she was always at our house, so to me she was aunt. Aunt Dan. But my mother and father had other friends, and they had their own lives, and they had each other, and they had me. But I had only Aunt Dan.
♥ Aunt Dan: Now Lemon, I have to tell you something very important about myself. And there aren't many things I'm sure of about myself, but this is something I can honestly say with absolute confidence, and it's something that I think is very important; it is what I never-no matter how annoyed or angry I may be-I never, ever shout at a waiter. And as a matter of fact, I never shout at a porter or a clerk in a bank or anybody else who is in a weaker position in society than me. Now this is very, very important; I will never even use a tone of voice with a person like that which I wouldn't use with you or your father or anyone else. You see, there are a lot of people today who will simply shout if they're angry at a waiter, but they'll very respectfully disagree if they happen to be angry at some powerful person like their boss or a government official. Now to me that's a terrible thing, a horrible thing. First of all, because I think it's cowardly. But mainly because it shows that these people don't recognize the value and importance of all those different jobs in society! They think a waiter is less important than a president. They look down on waiters! They don't admire what they do! They don't even notice whether someone is a good waiter or a bad waiter! They act as if we could sort of all afford to have no respect for waiters now, or secretaries, or maids, or building superintendents, because somehow we've reached a point where we can really just do without these people. Well, maybe there's some kind of a fantasy in these people's minds that we're already living in some society of the future in which these incredible robots are going to be doing all the work, and every actual citizen will be some kind of concert pianist or a sculptor or a president or something. But I mean, where are all these robots, actually? Have you ever seen one? Have they even been invented? Maybe they will be. But they're not here now. The way things are now, everybody just can't be a president. I mean-I mean, if there's no one around to cook the president's lunch, he's going to have a to cook it himself. Do you know what I'm saying? But if no one has put any food in his kitchen, he's going to have to go out and buy it himself. And if no one is waiting in the shop to sell it, he's going to have to go out into the countryside and grow it himself, and, you know, that's going to be a full-time job. I mean, he's going to have to resign as president in order to grow that food. It's as simple as that. If every shop clerk or maid or farmer were to quit their job today and try to be a painter or a nuclear physicist, then within about two weeks everyone in society, even people who used to be painters or nuclear physicists, would be out in the woods foraging for berries and roots. Society would completely break down. Because regular work is not one tiny fraction less necessary today than it ever was. And yet we're in this crazy situation that people have gotten it into their heads that regular work is somehow unimportant-it's somehow worth nothing. So now almost everyone who isn't at least a minister of foreign affairs feels that there's something wrong with what they do-they feel ashamed of it. Not only do they feel that what they do has no value-they feel actually humiliated to be doing it, as if each one of them had been singled out for some kind of unfair, degrading punishment. Each one feels, I shouldn't be a laborer, I shouldn't be a clerk, I shouldn't be a minor official! I'm better than that! And the next thing is, they're saying, "Well, I'll show them all-I won't work, I'll do nothing, or I'll do almost nothing, and I'll do it badly." So what's going to happen? We're going to start seeing these embittered typists typing up their documents incorrectly-and then passing them on to these embittered contractors, who will misinterpret them to these huge armies of embittered carpenters and embittered mechanics, and a year later or two years later, we're going to start seeing these ten-story buildings in every city collapsing to the ground, because each one of them is missing some crucial screw in some crucial girder. Buildings will collapse. Planes will come crashing out of the sky. Babies will be poisoned by bad baby food. How can it happen any other way?
♥ Aunt Dan: Of course, those things aren't actually happening now, so the heart doesn't care about them. But the things that will happen tomorrow are real too. When it is tomorrow, they'll be just as real as the things that are happening now.
♥ Jasper: Do you think this kind of thing is my normal life? I never do this. I'm on vacation. Now here's the situation: I'm going back home tomorrow morning, and I'm going to put this money in the bank, and right now I'd like to spend some-ten thousand pounds.
June: I think it's a good idea.
Mindy: For ten thousand pounds you can see my tits.
Andy: Please, Mindy, let's not turn my flat into an oriental market. Either go to bed with the nice man or send him home, but please don't sit on my sofa and sell different parts of yourself. Besides, if you start dividing yourself into pieces, how do you know we won't each take a section and end up tearing you to bits?
♥ Aunt Dan: I was incredibly in love. She kissed me back. I felt as if stars were flying through my head. She was gorgeous, perfect. We spent the rest of the night on the couch, and then we went out and had a great breakfast, and we spent a wonderful week together.
Pause.
Lemon: (To Aunt Dan): Why only a week?
Aunt Dan: Huh?
Lemon: Why only a week?
Pause.
Aunt Dan: Lemon, you know, it's because... (Pause.) Because love always cries out to be somehow expressed. (Pause.) But the expression of love leads somehow-nowhere. (A silence.) You express love, and suddenly you've... you've dropped off the map you were on, in a way, and onto another one-unrelated-like a bug being brushed from the edge of a table and falling off onto the rug below. The beauty of a face makes you touch a hand, and suddenly you're in a world of actions, of experiences, unrelated to the beauty of that face, unrelated to that face at all, unrelated to beauty. You're doing things and saying things you never wanted to say or do. You're suddenly spending every moment of your life in conversations, in encounters, that have no connection with anything you ever wanted for yourself. What you felt was love. What you felt was that the face was beautiful. And it was not enough for you just to feel love, just to sit in the presence of beauty and enjoy it. Something about your feeling itself made that impossible. And so you just didn't ask, Well, what will happen when I touch that hand? What will happen between that person and me? What will even happen to the thing I'm feeling at this very moment? Instead, you just walked right off that table, and there was that person, with all their qualities, and there was you, with all your qualities, and there you were together. And its' always, of course, extremely fascinating for as long as you can stand it, but it has nothing to do with the love you originally felt. Every time, in a way, you think it will have something to do with the love you felt. But it never does. It never has anything to do with love.
♥ Lemon (To the audience): ..In the year or two before Aunt Dan got sick there would sometimes be some odd moments, some crazy moments, in those beautiful restaurants. Some moments when both of us would just fall silent. Well, it was really quite straightforward, I suppose. I think there were crazy moments, sitting at those restaurant tables, when both of us were thinking, Well, why not? We adore each other. We always have. There you are sitting right next to me, and isn't this silly? Why don't I just lean over and give you a kiss? But of course Dan would never have touched me first. I would have to have touched her. Well, neither of us really took those moments seriously at all. But sure, there were moments, there were silences, when I could feel her thinking, Well, here I am sitting on this nice lawn, under this lovely tree, and there's a beautiful apple up there that I've got my eye on, and maybe if I just wait, if I just sit waiting here very quietly, maybe the apple will drop right into my lap. I could feel her thinking it, and I could feel how simple and natural it would be just to do it, just to hold her face and kiss her on the lips, but I never did it. It never happened. So there was me and Aunt Dan in the little house, and then there was me and Aunt Dan not touching each other in all those restaurants, and finally there was one last visit to Aunt Dan just before she died, in her own flat, when she was too sick to touch anybody.
♥ Lemon: Who is she now? Is she someone I've ever known? I can't tell. Filthy from the train, I got into her bathroom to wash my hands. And in the bathroom there are a thousand things I don't want to see-what pills she takes, what drops, what medicines-with labels I don't want to read-how many, how often to be taken each day. Have there ever been so many things to hide my eyes from in one small room? Soap that has touched her hands, her face; the basin over which she has bent; the well-worn towel, bearer of the imprint of her nose, her mouth-I feel no need now ever to see her again.
♥ Aunt Dan: She serves me as if she were a nun.
Lemon: A nun?
Aunt Dan: Going to the toilet. My meals. She knows me. We know each other. No secrets. No talking. She hears my thoughts. What would be the point of talking? Do you know the number of things going on in this room right now? There are hundreds! But while I'm talking, you hear only one-me. It's insanity to live like that. Insane. But she's listening to everything. We listen together. The insects, the wind, the water in the pipes. Sharing these things. Literally everything. The whole world.
♥ Lemon (To the audience): There's something that people never say about the Nazis now. (She drinks.) By the way, how can anybody like anything better than lime and celery juice? It is the best! The thing is that the Nazis were trying to create a certain way of life for themselves. That's obvious if you read these books I'm reading. They believed that the primitive society of the Germanic tribes had created a life of wholeness and meaning for each person. They blamed the sickness and degeneracy of society as they knew it-before they came to power, of course-on the mixture of races that had taken place since that tribal period. In their opinion, all the destructive values of greed, materialism, competitiveness, dishonesty, and so on, had been brought into their society by non-Germanic races. They may have been wrong about it, but that was their belief. So they were trying to create a certain way of life. They were trying to create, or re-create, some sort of society of brothers, bound together by a certain code of loyalty and honor. So to make that attempt, they had to remove the non-Germans, they had to eliminate interbreeding. They were trying to create a certain way of life. Now today, of course, everybody says, "How awful! How awful!" And they were certainly ruthless and thorough in what they did. But the mere fact of killing human beings in order to create a certain way of life is not something that exactly distinguishes the Nazis from everybody else. That's just absurd. When any people feels that its hopes for a desirable future are threatened by some other group, they always do the very same thing. The only question is the degree of the threat. Now for us, for example, criminals are a threat, but they're only a small threat. Right now, we would say about criminals that they're a serious annoyance. We would call them a problem. And right now, the way we deal with that problem is that we take the criminals and we put them in jail. But if these criminals became so vicious, if there got to be so many of them, that our most basic hopes as a society were truly threatened by them-if our whole system of prisons and policemen had fallen so far behind the problem that the streets if our cities were controlled and dominated by violent criminals-then we would find ourselves forgetting the prisons and just killing the criminals instead. It's just a fact. Or let's take the Communists. There are Communists, now, who meet in little groups in America and England. They don't disrupt our entire way of life. They just have their meetings. If they break a law, if they commit a crime, we punish them according to the penalty prescribed. But in some countries, they threaten to destroy their whole way of life. In those countries the Communists are strong, they're violent, they're actually fanatics. And usually it turns out that people decide that they have to be killed. Or when the Europeans first came to America, well, the Indians were there. The Indians fought them for every scrap of land. There was no chance to build the kind of society the Europeans wanted with the Indians there. If they'd tried to put all the Indians in jail, they would have had to put all their effort into building jails, and then, when the Indians came out, they would undoubtedly have started fighting all over again as hard as before. And so they decided to kill the Indians. So it becomes absurd to talk about the Nazis as if the Nazis were unique. That's a kind of hypocrisy. Because the fact is, no society has ever considered the taking of life an unpardonable crime or even, really, a major tragedy. It's something that's done when it has to be done, and it's as simple as that. It's no different from the fact that if I have harmful or obnoxious insects-let's say, cockroaches-living in my house, I probably have to do something about it. Or at least, the question I have to ask is: How many are there? If the cockroaches are small, and I see a few of them now and then, that may not be very disturbing to me. But if I see big ones, if I start to see them often, then I say to myself, they have to be killed. Now some people simply hate to kill cockroaches, so they'll wait much longer. But if the time comes when there are hundreds of them, when they're crawling out of every drawer, when they're in the oven, when they're in the refrigerator, when they're in the toilet, when they're in the bed, then even the person who hates to kill them will go to the shop and get some poison and start killing, because the way of life that that person had wanted to lead is now really being threatened. Yes, the fact is, it is vert unpleasant to kill another creature-let's admit it. Each one of us has his own fear of pain and his own fear of death. It's true for people and for every type of creature that lives. I remember once squashing a huge brown roach-I slammed it with my shoe, but it wasn't dead and I sat and watched it, and it's an awful period just before any creature dies-any insect or animal-when you're watching the stupid, ignorant things that that creature is trying to do to fight off its death-whether it's moving its arms or its legs, or it's kicking, or it's trying to lift itself off the ground-those things can't prevent death!-but the creature is trying out every gesture it's capable of, hoping, hoping that something will help it. And I remember how I felt as I watched that big brown roach squirming and crawling, and yet it was totally squashed, and I could see its insides slowly come oozing out. And I'm sure that the bigger a thing is, the more you hate to see it. I remember when I was in school we did some experiments on these big rats, and we had to inject them with poison and watch them die-and, of course, no matter what humane method you use in any laboratory to kill the animals, there's a moment that comes when they sense what's happening and they start to try out all those telltale squirming gestures. And with people, of course, it's the same thing. The bigger the creature, the harder it is to kill. We know it takes at least ten minutes to hang a person. Even if you shoot them in the head, it's not instantaneous-they still make those squirming movements at least for a moment. And people in gas chambers rush to the doors that they know very well are firmly locked. They fight each other to get to the doors. So killing is always very unpleasant. Now when people say, "Oh the Nazis were different from anyone, the Nazis were different from anyone," well, perhaps that's true in at least one way, which is that they observed themselves extremely frankly in the act of killing, and they admitted frankly how they really felt about the whole process. Yes, of course, they admitted, it's very unpleasant, and if we didn't have to do it in order to create a way of life that we want for ourselves, we would never be involved in killing at all. But since we have to do it, why not be truthful about it, and why not admit that yes, yes, there's something inside us that likes to kill. Some part of us. There's something inside us that likes to do it. Why shouldn't that be so? Our human nature is derived from the nature of different animals, and of course there's a part of animal nature that likes to kill. If killing were totally repugnant to animals, they couldn't survive. So an enjoyment of killing is somewhere inside us, somewhere in our nature. In polite society, people don't discuss it, but the fact is that it's enjoyable-it's enjoyable-to make plans for killing, and it's enjoyable to learn about killing that is done by other people, and it's enjoyable to think about killing, and it's enjoyable to read about killing, and it's even enjoyable actually to kill, although when we ourselves are actually killing, an element of unpleasantness always comes in. That unpleasant feeling starts to come in. But even there, one has to say, even though there's an unpleasant side at first to watching people die, we have to admit that after watching for a while-maybe after watching for a day or maybe for a week or a year-it's still in a way unpleasant to watch, but on the other hand we have to admit that after we've watched it for all that time-well, we don't really actually care any more. We have to admit that we don't really care. And I think that that last admission is what really makes people go mad about the Nazis, because in our own society we have this kind of cult built up around what people call the feeling of "compassion." I remember my mother screaming all the time, "Compassion! Compassion! You have to have compassion for other people! You have to have compassion for other human beings!" And I must admit, there's something I find refreshing about the Nazis, which is partly why I enjoy reading about them every night, because they sort of had the nerve to say, "Well, what is this compassion? Because I don't really know what it is. So I want to know, really, what is it?" And they must have sort of asked each other at some point, "Well say, Heinz, have you ever felt it?" "Well no, Rolf, what about you?" And they all had to admit that they really didn't know what the hell it was. And I find it sort of relaxing to read about those people, because I have to admit that I don't know either. I mean, I think I've felt it reading a novel, and I think I've felt it watching a film-"Oh how sad, that child is sick! That mother is crying!"-but I can't ever remember feeling it in life. I just don't remember feeling it about something that was happening in front of my eyes. And I can't believe that other people are that different from me. In other words, it was unpleasant to watch that pitiful roach scuttling around on my floor dying, but I can't say I really felt sad about it. I felt revolted or sickened, I guess I would say, but I can't say that I really felt sorry for the roach. And plenty of people have cried in my presence or seemed to be suffering, and I remember wishing they'd stop suffering and stop crying and leave me alone, but I don't remember, frankly, that I actually cared. So you have to say finally, well, fine, if there are all these people like my mother who want to go around talking about compassion all day, well, fine, that's their right. But it's sort of refreshing to admit every once in a while that they're talking about something that possibly doesn't exist. And it's sort of an ambition of mine to go around some day and ask each person I meet, Well here is something you've heard about to the point of nausea all of your life, but do you personally, actually remember feeling it, and if you really do, could you please describe the particular circumstances in which you felt it and what it actually felt like? Because if there's one thing I learned from Aunt Dan, I suppose you could say it was a kind of honesty. It's easy to say we should all be loving and sweet, but meanwhile we're enjoying a certain way of life-and we're actually living-due to the existence of certain other people who are willing to take the job of killing on their own backs, and it's not a bad thing every once in a while to admit that that's the way we're living, and even to give to those certain people a tiny, fractional crumb of thanks. You can be very sure that it's more than they expect, but I think they'd be grateful, all the same.
The lights fade as she sits and drinks.
-----------------------------
♥ And this is why I realize that as long as I preserve my loyalty to my childhood training I will never know what it is to be truly comfortable, and this is why I feel a fantastic need to tear that training out of my heart once and for all so that I can finally begin to enjoy the life that is spread out before me like a feast. And every time a friend makes that happy choice and sets himself free, I find that I inwardly exult and rejoice, because it means there will be one less person to disapprove of me if I choose to do the same.
As I write these words, in New York City in 1985, more and more people who grew up around me are making this decision; they are throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation: Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, we live in beautiful homes, we're surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food. And if there are people out there who don't seem to like us and who would like to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to man our gates and keep those people away. And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission, and we only hope they'll do what they do with diligence and skill.
The amazing thing I've noticed about those friends of mine who've made that choice is that as soon as they've made it, they begin to blossom, to flower, because they are no longer hiding, from themselves or anyone else, the true facts about their own lives. They become very frank about human nature. They freely admit that man is a predatory creature, a hunter and a fighter, and they admit that it can warm a human's heart to trick an enemy, to make him cry, to make him do what he doesn't want to do, and even to make him crawl in the mud and die in agony. They admit that to manipulate people can be an art, and that to deceive people can be entertaining. They admit that there's a skill involved in playing life's game, and they admit that it's exciting to bully and threaten and outwit and defeat all the other people who are playing against you. And as they learn to admit these things, and they lose the habit of looking over their shoulders in fear at what exists in their own souls, they develop the charm and grace which shine out from all people who are truly comfortable with themselves, who are not worried, who are not ashamed of their own actions. These are people who are free to love life exuberantly. They can enjoy a bottle of wine or a walk in the garden with unmixed pleasure, because they feel justified in having the bottle of wine, in having the garden. And if, by chance, they run into the laundress who takes care of their clothes, they can chat with her happily and easily, because they accept the fact that some people, themselves, happen to wear beautiful clothes, and others are paid to keep them clean. And, in fact, these people who accept themselves are people whose company everyone enjoys.
So there are those who live gracelessly in a state of discomfort, because they allow themselves to be whipped on an hourly basis by morality's lash, and then there's another group of cheerful, self-confident people who've put morality aside for now, and they're looking happy. But whenever I start dreaming about self-confident people I begin to get terribly nervous, because I always think of the marvelous self-confidence of Hitler, the way he would expound his theories of the world to his aides and orderlies and secretaries at the dining room table night after night with no sense that he needed to keep checking to see if his theories were really true. Hitler's boundless self-confidence enabled him to live each day as a tireless murderer; no weakness, no flagging energy, kept his knife from plunging into his victims hour after hour with mechanical ease. And so, naturally, I ask myself, will I become like him? Yes, of course, I long to be comfortable. But to become a murderer? To murder everyone? If I gave up morality, what would prevent me from murdering everyone?
Hitler was a man who was drawn to murder, to thinking about murder, to dwelling on murder. Particularly to dwelling on murder. Can we not imagine with what eager excitement he must have listened to all of the latest reports from the death camps, the crematoria, which he never in fact visited on a single occasion? But when we speak of dwelling on murder... that person standing over the daily newspaper-reading about the massacre, reading about the bloodbath, reading about the execution in a room in the prison-that person is me. And am I not in some part of myself identifying with the one in the story who is firing the machine gun at the innocent people, who is pulling the switch that sends the jolts of power through the prisoner strapped in the electric chair? And do I not also enjoy reading about those incredible scientists who are making the preparations for what we might do in some future war that might take place? Do I not join them in picturing, with some small relish, the amazing effects which our different devices would have on possible victims? Is my blood not racing with abnormal speed as I read about these things? Is there not something trembling inside me? I know that these planners, these scientists, are not involved in killing. They're killing no one. But I see what they're doing-they're building the gas chambers, getting together the pellets of poison, assembling the rooms where the clothing and valuables will all be sorted, transporting the victims to convenient camps, and asking them to get undressed for the showers and disinfection which will soon be following. Of course, no one is putting people into the chambers. No one is pumping in the gas.
But wait a minute. Am I crazy now? What am I saying? What does this have to do with Hitler? Of course, I may have insane impulses somewhere inside me, but the difference between Hitler and me is that there was nothing in Hitler which restrained him from following any of his insane impulses to their logical, insane conclusions-he was capable of doing anything at all, if given the chance-because he was utterly without connection to morality.
But I just was thinking about cutting my connection to morality also.
Yes, I was thinking about it. But I didn't do it. At least, I have no memory of doing it. Or was there actually some moment when I did do it, which I've now forgotten?
I don't seem to remember what's happened at all. I know there was a time when I was not like Hitler.
The past feels so terribly close. It's as if I could reach out and touch it. Could I have become like one of those people who remembers, as if it were yesterday, the time when principles of decency grew freshly in his heart, when a love for humanity set him off on his path in life, who still believes that each of his actions is driven and motivated by those very principles and that very love, but who in fact is a coarse and limited brute who buried both love and principles long ago?
How could a person break his attachment to morality without noticing it, without feeling it, without remembering it? Could a perfectly decent person just turn into a cold-hearted beast, a monster, and still feel pretty much the same?
Of course. A perfectly decent person can turn into a monster perfectly easily. And there's no reason why he would feel any different. Because the difference between a perfectly decent person and a monster is just a few thoughts. The perfectly decent person who follows a certain chain of reasoning, ever so slightly and subtly incorrect, becomes a perfect monster at the end of the chain.
Thoughts have extraordinary power in the human world. They can do odd things. Familiar thoughts can lead us by the hand to very strange thoughts. And in a way, we're not as clever as our own thoughts, which have a peculiar habit of developing on their own and taking us to conclusions we never particularly wanted to reach. Even within each thought, other thoughts are hidden, waiting to crawl out.
♥ Morality, if it survived, could protect us from horror, but very little protects morality. And morality, besides, is hard to protect, because morality is only a few thoughts in our heads. And just as we quickly grow accustomed to brutal deeds and make way before them, so we are quickly stunned into foggy submission by the brutal thoughts which, in our striving for comfort, we have allowed into our minds and which can snuff the life out of morality in a matter of moments if we happen to look the other way. And all the time we are operating under the illusion that we, mere individuals, have no power at all over the course of history, when that is in fact (for better or worse) the very opposite of the case.
The shocking truth is that history, too, is at the mercy of my thoughts, and the political leaders of the world sit by their radios waiting to hear whether morality has sickened or died inside my skull. The process is simple. I speak with you, and then I turn out the light and I go to sleep, but, while I sleep, you talk on the telephone to a man you met last year in Ohio, and you tell him what I said, and he hangs up and talks to a neighbor of his, and what I said keeps travelling, farther and farther. And just as a fly can quite blithely and indifferently land on the nose of a queen, so the thought which yuo mentioned to the man in Ohio can make its way with unimaginable speed into the mind of a president. Because a society is very little more than a network of brains, and a president is no less involved in his society's network than anyone else, and there is almost nothing that he thinks that doesn't come right from that network. In fact, he is virtually incapable of coming up with an attitude to any problem or to any event which has not been nurtured and developed in that network of brains. So as he searches in his mind for a sound approach to the latest cable from the Soviet Premier, what comes to the surface is a thought which he happened to get from me, a thought which first occurred to me one evening thirty years ago when my grandmother turned over a card in a game of canasta with a certain unusual expression on her face.
My grandmother's silence, her manner, affected me. Her gesture, expressive of certain feelings about myself, gave rise in me to a thought, and that thought had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. It was just a thought about family life. But when it sooner or later becomes necessary for any of us-whether president or ordinary citizen-to come up with thoughts about political affairs, the only raw materials which we have to draw on are the thoughts we've previously formed on the conflicts and dramas of daily life. Our thoughts may be ones we've dreamed up ourselves, or we may have acquired them from our parents, from our lovers, from our Aunt Dan, or from the man in Ohio. But wherever we've found them, they are all we have to work with. Our political attitudes can only come out of what we are-what we were as children, what we've become today, what we've learned in school, at the playground, at the party, at the beach, at home, in bed. And as all of our attitudes flow into action, flow into history, the bedroom and the battlefield soon seem to be one.
..Everything you are affects me, and everything I am, all my thoughts-the behavior I admire or criticize, the way I choose to spend an hour of my time, the things I like to talk about, the stories I like to hear, the jokes I like to tell, the events which delight me and the events which displease me-affect the course of history whether I like it or not, whether I know about it or not, whether I care or not. My power over history is inescapable except through death. Privacy is an illusion. What I do is public, and what I think is public. The fragility of my own thoughts becomes the fragility of the world. The ease with which I could become a swine is the ease with which the world could fall apart, like something rotten.
♥ Morality happens to be a protection which we need in order to avoid total historical disaster, and so we are obliged to maintain a constant, precise awareness of how morality is faring in the world. Unfortunately or not, we cannot afford to turn our eyes away when our acquaintances, our friends, or we ourselves, drop down a few degrees on the scale of obedience to moral principles. It is obviously foolish and absurd to judge some small decline on the moral scale as if it were a precipitous, lengthy slide. But the temptation is great to be easy on ourselves, and we've all discovered that it's easier to be easy on ourselves if we're all easy on each other too, and so we are. So when a precipitous slide really does take place, a particular effort is required in order to see it. Sophistries, false chains of reasoning, deception, and self-deception all rush in to conceal the fact that any change has occurred at all.
If we live from day to day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to ourselves and the world. But if we look into the mirror, we just might observe a rapacious face. Perhaps the face will even show subtle traces, here and there, of hatred and savagery beneath the surface. And maybe most of us look a little bit like Hitler, that ever-present ghost. All right then, we may say in response to the mirror, we are vile, we know it. Everyone is. That's the way people are. Of course we're like Hitler, and we're sick of lacerating ourselves about it, and as a matter if fact, we're even sick of lacerating Hitler-let him be.
This self-pitying response to the unflattering news that we're not quite good means that we've decided, if that's how things are, that we'll accept evil; we'll no longer make any effort to oppose it. This response leads right towards death.
But it is utterly ridiculous to say that people are vile. If we step outside and pay a brief visit to the nearest supermarket or the nearest café, we will find ourselves in a position to see, scattered perhaps among scenes of ugliness and greed, examples-some number of examples-of behavior which is thoughtful or kind, moments when someone could easily have been cold or cruel but in fact was not. Perhaps we will see the very same person do something harsh and a moment later something gentle. Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there's something particularly disingenuous and cheap about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it's already over.
~~from On the Context of the Play.