Everybody's Autobiography (16 page)

Identity always worries me and memory and eternity.

I read a poem of George Eliot when I was very young I can not
often remember poetry but I can remember that. May I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again. Well I was not at all intending it but like anybody I knew about that.

In the bath this morning I was drumming on the side of the bathtub, I like moving around in the water in a bathtub, and I found myself drumming the Chopin funeral march and I might have stopped doing it but I went on because they used to play it on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco and I was worrying then about identity and memory and eternity, and I am not worrying now but there it is if the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does everything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything. As I say there was a God but there was no mention of everlasting. Anything is a superstition and anybody rightly believes in superstition. Because it is certain that superstition means that what has been is going on. I always rightfully believe and believed in every superstition.

It did not really help much when I was young it helps more now. Now superstition is really realer than it was then. There is one thing though that has never changed and that is if you start putting on anything inside out you must continue, otherwise it would change everything. I can know that that does happen because of absentmindedness by reason of something troubling and all the same the fact remains one should not change. I do not mind the dark now. But high places well that has to be talked about later.

Seeing superstition has nothing to do with believing anything except what anybody is seeing. Just the other day I was talking to a Princeton professor and I was talking about the way it is not at all interesting to take working men so seriously if by working men one means only those who work in a factory. There is really nothing so very moving that there are so many of them, there are so many of them because there was so much virgin soil that could produce so much food and so factories were produced in such quantity because as they could be so easily fed why should they not be
in a factory. But now when the virgin soil is used up and there is no more because all of it is known all the earth is known so then just at this time the factory working man is being self-conscious completely conscious of his own existence just when inevitably virgin soil being used up he will have to go back to dirt farming, and in dirt farming it is not easy to regulate anything because things do happen, in factories anything can be regulated because really nothing does really happen. I remember when I first came to Paris waiting to get a pair of shoes that I was having soled and the owner of the shop was having a row with a workman. They got madder and madder until finally the boss said and what are you you are just as stupid as anybody who works in any factory and the workman could not answer, how could he answer. Well I was talking like this to the Princeton professor and he said well if these are the facts there is no hope and I said well what is hope hope is just contact with the facts. Alice Toklas always says I do not look facts in the face well anyway what are facts, one thing is sure that everybody has a knowledge of gods even if they have no knowledge of eternity.

When I was just beginning high school I knew a girl whose name was Cora Moore. There were two things about her she could make turban hats decorated with pansies or nasturtiums as a flower and her mother believed in spiritualism, so perhaps did my father anyway they both believed in prophecy but anybody does that and why not since prophesying is prophesying. The mattress maker in Belley says he does not believe in the predictions of the almanac because when they say there is going to be good weather as the country is large enough somewhere in France there is good weather and so the almanac is never wrong. In California everybody was interested in prophecy. That is natural enough as gold was still something somebody could remember. Cora Moore said why should her mother go to another spiritualist when she could be one and so she and I used to go together while she was one.

One can do anything all over.

She said that she knew just what they did, they had spirits come all over and then they told what they had told her. And so Cora decided to do it too. She was the only Cora I ever knew.

She did do it but it did not then really interest me because after all the difference between whether she believed it or whether she did not was nothing. To me it really had nothing to do with anything that was interesting. I never did take on spirits either then or later they had nothing to do with the problem of everlasting not for me, because anybody can know that the earth is covered all over with people and if the air is too what is the difference to any one there are an awful lot of them anyway and in a way I really am only interested in what a genius can say the rest is just there anyway. In a kind of a way even then I felt like that, I could not see why there being so many of them made it any more interesting.

I had just been writing that after all the only difference between man and animals is that men can count. No animals count. And of course the thing they count when they count is money, no animal can count money only men can do that and in a queer way just now when eternity is not all troubling any one because every one knows that here on this earth are the only men and everybody knows all there is on this earth and everybody knows that there is all there is to it just now counting is a more absorbing occupation than it ever has been, people thinking in millions, they love the sound of numbers, it is the religion of every one just now counting is all there is of religion for them.

But in those days in California I was interested in everlasting and I wondered so much about everything that I was almost alone and if you are almost alone well all that there is is almost alone.

So the winter after I wrote the Autobiography was almost over and I had almost thought I would go to America to lecture.

This time it was Bernard Faÿ who thought I should go and still if you have not been anywhere for thirty years why not go.

Sometimes in Paris people used to turn up that I had not seen
for many years. I remember one year two or three that I had not seen for eighteen years turned up. Certainly there is no use in seeing anybody you have not seen for eighteen years, and I hoped it would not happen again. Alice Toklas always liked a poem that used to go, Give me new faces new faces new faces I have seen the old ones and just then well there did not seem any reason why one should see the old ones any more.

Having written all about them they ceased to exist. That is very funny if you write all about any one they do not exist any more, for you, and so why see them again. Anyway that is the way I am.

Picasso used to say during the war will it not be awful when Braque and Derain and all the rest of them put their wooden legs up on the chair and tell about their fighting, but it never did enter his head that this generation would completely not think about those happenings and that if they did he would not be there to listen as they were certainly not to see each other often.

After war for this generation has turned out to be more oppressive than war even now when a good many of them are the age of grandfathers when it would be natural to be reminiscing.

Nobody even remembers first going to Russia when everybody was interested in Soviets, now they all look upon Sovietism as being out of fashion. Oh yes they say the communists do not know that they are very conservative, the only thing that is never out of fashion are the anarchists but really there never can be very many of them because they are not out of fashion.

In those early days of Russia just after the war I happened to come back from the garage where I kept my car, lots of young men had come to see us just then and they were full of Sovietism. I laughed, I said one of the chauffeurs over in the garage has just come back from Russia where he has been with the French general for whom he was driving, I said and how is Russia he
said, Russia they put down far too much tar far too much tar they cover the roads with tar. Well I said but how is life under communism, not as expensive as I thought he answered it cost me about as much as it does at Deauville.

In a French village they understand all about that, they say the men in politics are like the women in dressing, sometimes the skirts are long and sometimes the skirts are short, well perhaps it was I who said that well anyway they said they agreed with that.

After all it is troublesome.

There is no difference between men and animals except that they can count and never has there been so much counting as is going on at present. Everybody is counting, counting is everybody's occupation. And that is because everybody is certain that there is the difference that is what makes men men and as everybody wants to be sure that men are men just now wants to have it as an affirmation everybody is counting. I always liked counting but I liked counting one two three four five six seven, or one little Indian two little Indians three little Indian boys counting more than ten is not interesting at least not to me because the numbers higher than ten unless they are fifty-five or something like that do not look interesting and certainly when one goes higher than a hundred there is not much difference, of course there is but yet again there is not.

The queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey the king was in his counting room counting out his money.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

It is troublesome, not counting, anybody can count, even if like the Spanish women and Chinamen they count with pebbles what is troublesome is religion and when counting gets to be religion it gets to be troublesome.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place but that is only because there is not enough of it, nuts always fall in the same place
which makes one say brother brother go find your brother. When you drop one nut there is another just there which you had not seen before there was a pair.

Well that may have nothing to do with it but they have just asked me to write an article as to why any one who writes as I do which is not understandable can be so popular which means can be so understood. Has that anything to do with lightning not striking twice in the same place because there is not enough of it or nuts falling in the same place because there are so many of them. I wonder.

Every time I go out I meet some one and we talk together of revolutions and the weather.

Revolutions do and many of them can never do better than come. The Spanish civil war has frightened the French.

Every time we talk about revolutions we know that there is going to be another. After all and that does make me know that when I was frightened when I first knew that civilizations came to an end and cities were buried that it was nothing to frighten because after all the earth is round and do what you like it can only be round and so a civilization must end a mechanical civilization as well as any other. After all two hundred years is not a great deal of bother. And two hundred years is as much as anybody can remember.

And so I do know what a genius is, a genius is some one who does not have to remember the two hundred years that everybody else has to remember.

But really believe it or not it is strange to see that a mechanical civilization can end just like any other.

I just met a French woman Madame Chabout the wife of the doctor and I was telling her that now they talked in America about something they called dirt farming. What is that, she said. I said that is touching the earth with your hands. Indeed and she said why not and I said because for a hundred years they almost
did not. And we she said we are just learning not to. Yes I said the farmers in Bilignin tell me that if they had to thresh grain the way they used to they would none of them raise any. Well she said as the French are logical they may stop before they begin. That is what makes them all now think of a king.

That is what I suppose does take the longest to realize that a republic in Europe is never a natural thing. In America we really have not known anything else, but in Europe they like to count them. I am always pleased the careful way that the present republic in France is always spoken of as the third republic.

The more I think of everything the more I realize that what worries every one is that the earth is round. That is what I liked in being in an airplane the earth does not look round as it does on the ocean. It looks flat, but is it, everything seems to tell everybody that it is not. It is round.

I detach myself from the earth being round and mechanical civilizations being over and organization being dull although nobody knows it yet but they will and go on with what happened the summer before we went to America.

They ask me to tell why an author like myself can become popular. It is very easy everybody keeps saying and writing what anybody feels that they are understanding and so they get tired of that, anybody can get tired of anything everybody can get tired of something and so they do not know it but they get tired of feeling they are understanding and so they take pleasure in having something that they feel they are not understanding. I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

I always did like that you did it like this:

That was almost as exciting as a spelling match.

That is all understanding is you know it is all in the feeling.

My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear, perhaps that is the reason but really there is no reason except that the earth is round and that no one knows the limits of the universe that is the whole thing about men and women that is interesting. All the rest is human nature and I have written Alice Toklas says and she is always right so much so that I often ask does it not tire her that I have written altogether too much about what is human nature.