Chapter 54
You are trying to give yourself a good excuse for
being here. You feel that someone has demanded an explanation
and that you've been called upon to rationalize a meat-chopper.
And in your befuddlement you lose the trend of the
arguments you were going to use, and stammer and search
despairingly for one word to follow another in orderly meaning.
You start by asking questions that you cannot answer, and
you end up by answering questions that you haven't asked.
"God in His infinite wisdom. . .God in His infinite wisdom."
It's a beautiful phrase, and even if you accept it
as being more than beauty, there must be many things
He cannot know. Surely, among all the millions of worlds
that He has scattered into space, there must be one
whose records have been misplaced and who has failed to
stand each morning's formation without being marked AWOL.
mmmSurely among
so many there must be one that He would overlook
on his regular tours of inspection and for whom His
search would be abandoned in the press of other affairs.
Surely, there must be one whose events are haphazard
mmmcoincidences
and whose history is a combination of accidents and whose
immediate destiny is largely in the hands of its inhabitants.
Some of these inhabitants have a special code by which
they live, and others have only the simple, realistic credo
of unorganized vegetation. Some of them build meat-choppers,
mmmmethodically, fanatically,
and they think that the solution to all their ills
lies in the construction of a bigger one than was
ever built before. Others try to disassemble the mechanism and
destroy it and seek out the blueprints and put them
to the torch, but the battlecries they utter are words
they only vaguely know and the hopes they attempt to
redeem have never been fulfilled and the principles they extol
have but rarely been practiced. They have what they call
democracy and they are content to let it muddle along
like a spoiled child, wasting its time and money and
making mistake after mistake with amiable caprice but
mmmpreserving its
health by declining to worry. And the only reason it
survives is that it is inherently optimistic and no matter
how bleak the outlook, it would never contemplate its
mmmself-destruction.
But what do they intend doing when the meat-chopper has
been torn down? Will they go right on habitually tinkering
with the same old defective parts and excavate in the
same old insecure foundation and just give it a new
coat of paint and name it something else? There are
lots of inhabitants who have been valiantly butting their brows
against its structure until they have become unconscious
mmmand fallen
into a deep dream in which everything was cleared away
and a bright edifice miraculously arose. And when they awaken
they want to feel that they have become a part
of that dream and that a pleasantly furnished room awaits
them with a soft, luxurious bed and an adjacent bath.
They don't know how it will come about, but they
know that it will happen. It won't be a shining
sword coming down out of the sky, and it won't
be a paid advertisement in a newspaper and it won't
be a burning bush and it won't be a single
man or a single idea or even a new kind
of veterans' organization. But they are sure of its coming
and they are certain that when it arrives it will
be more like having a reunion than greeting a stranger.
Happiness is a good thing. Somebody ought to start it.
* * *
