‘Anyway,’ said the Ghost, ‘who wants to be rescued? What the hell would there be to do here?’‘Or there?’ said I.‘Quite,’ said the Ghost, ‘They’ve got you either way.’‘What would you like to do if you had your choice?’ I asked.‘There you go!’ said the Ghost with a certain triumph. ‘Asking me to make a plan. It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job. Why should we do it for them? That’s just where all the parsons and moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking us to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and powerful, why don’t they find something to suit the public? …’-- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 7
This is one of my favorite books. There is a certain dreadful whimsy to
it. After thirty years, I’ve finally gotten
around to starting Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, which has,
to me at least, that same sort of a feel.
The excerpt above is from a conversation with a character
referred to as the Hard-Bitten Ghost. He
was unimpressed with Pekin, the Taj Mahal, hell, and heaven. He was not one to be taken in. We are amateur cynics. The Hard-Bitten Ghost was a professional. In a
way, the Hard-Bitten Ghost is very much the spirit of our age. I strongly suspect that we can attribute many
of our woes, socially, politically and economically, to exactly that sort of thinking. There is a conspiracy behind everything. Everybody is in cahoots. The political parties are all the same. Everything is run by the bankers … yada, yada, yada, as someone once
said.
And the funny thing is, there is a level at which that is
true.
If we surrender our destiny to the secular and the temporal,
or, as John put it, to the world, the flesh, and the devil -- the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, we will become
hard-bitten and jaded. Inevitably. We will see the
world with cold and weary eyes. Our laughter will
be joyless, our humor nothing but base and cruel snark. Nobody gets a belly-laugh out of it. Our lips might curl in a “collie” smile, our
amusement seated in our sense of superiority.
But it is no fun.
What would you like to
do if you had your choice?
It is a dangerous question.
4 comments:
What would you like to do if you had your choice?
The Hard-Bitten Ghost dodges the question marvelously, doesn't he?
The funny thing is, most people (once they reach adulthood) actually do have that choice. The idea that they don't is an illusion, usually consisting of a handy set of excuses people tell themselves to explain why they aren't doing what they really would, if only they "had their choice."
That's the wonderful and awful thing about true freedom.
Yes, freedom is scary -- it means I am responsible for both how I act and how I react.
Like probably everybody else, I have family members who are always complaining about how miserable they are -- and it is always the fault of someone else. I've even done it myself. It's my choice to feel that why, though, even when I don't want to face it.
HB Ghost reminds me of my older brother. Who in turn, reminds me of the Pharaoh. I think at some point God says, "You want a hardened-heart? You got it."
Anyway, Frankl proved, in a sense, that you can make your own weather.
I used to refer to his book, Man's Search for Meaning, as my little bible.
There are some beautiful moments even in the camps.
Your own weather -- Al Capp had that character Joe Btfsplk who walked around with his own personal rain cloud. I did not remember that he was the world's worst jinx, but that makes sense.
If we're not careful, they will rain on our parade. It's tough sometimes to keep the right attitude.
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