The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell [smart ebook reader .TXT] 📗

their flamens and imauns, their medicine men and popes and rectors, were unanimous⁠—would be quite different.

Today alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now⁠—and it was this, precisely, that you were to disregard. Such was the burden of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of mankind’s abhorrence of actualities; and man’s quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art performed what religion only promised.

XVII Evolution of a Vestryman

But, much as man’s religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical existence tomorrow, just so, upon another scale, man’s daily life seemed a continuous looking-forward to a terrestrial tomorrow. Kennaston could find in the past⁠—even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride⁠—no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that today was only a dull overture to tomorrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen tomorrow. This was as true of Antioch as Lichfield, as much the case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and Tiglath-Pileser, as with Felix Kennaston.

Kennaston considered his own life.⁠ ⁠… In childhood you had looked forward to being a man⁠—a trapper of the plains or a railway engineer or a pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through the necessity of going to school five times a week. In vacations, of course, you looked forward to school’s beginning again, because next term was to be quite different from the last, and moreover because last session, in retrospection, did not appear to have been half bad. And of course you were always wishing it would hurry up and be your birthday, or Christmas, or even Easter.⁠ ⁠… Later, with puberty, had come the desire to be a devil with the women, like the fellows in Wycherley’s plays (a cherished volume, which your schoolmates, unaccountably, did not find sufficiently “spicy”); and to become a great author, like Shakespeare; and to have plenty of money, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; and to be thrown with, and into the intimate confidence of, famous people, like the hero of a Scott novel.⁠ ⁠… Kennaston reflected that his touchstones seemed universally to have come from the library.⁠ ⁠… And Felix Kennaston had achieved his desire, to every intent, however unready posterity stood to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and however many tourists still went with reverence to Stratford. For the rest, he had sufficient money and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected that, through accident’s signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very earnestly wanted to do; and that the result was always disappointing, and not as it was depicted in storybooks.⁠ ⁠… He wondered why he should again be harking back to literary standards.

Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had always been shuffling through today⁠—somehow and anyhow⁠—in the belief that tomorrow the life of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a romance like those in storybooks.

The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed, from a girl’s lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed. It was to come from marriage, after which everything would be quite different; but the main innovation was that he missed the long delightful talks he used to have with Kathleen (mostly about Felix Kennaston), since as married people they appeared only to speak to each other, in passing, as it were, between the discharge of various domestic and social duties, and speaking then of having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that. The transfiguring touch was to come from wealth; and it had not, for all that his address was in the Social Register, and was neatly typed in at the beginning of one copy of pretty much every appeal sent broadcast by charitable organizations. It was to come from fame; and it had not, even with the nine-day wonder over Men Who Loved Alison, and with Felix Kennaston’s pictorial misrepresentation figuring in public journals, almost as prodigally as if he had murdered his wife with peculiar brutality or headed a company to sell inexpensive shoes. And, at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps tomorrow.⁠ ⁠… Then he had by accident found out the sigil’s power.⁠ ⁠…

Men everywhere were living as he had lived. People got their notions of life, if only at second- or third-hand, from books, precisely as he had done. Even Amrou had derived his notions as to the value of literature from a book. Men pretended laboriously that their own lives were like the purposeful and clearly motived life of book-land. In secret, the more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, anyhow, their lives would begin to be like that tomorrow. The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequences, their love-affairs, their maxims, their passions, their ethics, their conversations, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickednesses, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life