The Eden Party

The first of the witnesses at the unprecedented convention
(the nature of which need not be described until a future paragraph)
was Jasper Foy, a plump and bald man of 40 years.

"The chairman has been right, I think, in saying:

'Let us not deceive ourselves. Probably nothing will come of this, or what come of it we may not like in the least, or perhaps it would be most exact to say that it is not likely that anything will come of this!'

"He is right, but I would also like to say that I for my part am here in the belief that **any change will be an improvement**.

"Now to come to the point and to tell you how I came to be unhappy, I will say first of all that I really do not know. Perhaps description will reveal the reasons to you, but I doubt it. Not only that: I don't believe that any of us who are here convened know the reasons for our unhappiness, though unhappiness is precisely our reason for being here.

"Yet I think I can make out a turning-point. I was unhappy as a child, as an adolescent, and as a young man. But always, like many of you, I believed that at some future time life would be otherwise, life would be like a holiday, or full of grandeur, or full of love, or full of excitement and satisfaction, like a game of cards or a tennis match. The turning-point, the real descent, came when I no longer believed my vague and beautiful hopes to be true or at least probable".

(There was a certain unrest, yet at the same time a murmur of recognition, as at a play, when Jasper Foy spoke of the end of hope.)

2.

"Is it necessary to observe that the end of my hopes came slowly, day by day and hardly perceived? Perhaps it has been different for some. The rejection of a manuscript, the marriage of the girl one was in love with, the conviction that one will never become a great painter--such events may mark like a thunderclap or like a ceremony the beginning of true unhappiness.

"Even so, I think there is a slow process of self-deception which begins long before and proceeds by means of many small and habitual pleasures just as well as by means of small or shocking disappointments.

"For me, the small pleasures were very important in bringing me to the pit of true unhappiness. For much of my youth I went to the motion-pictures three or four times a week because I had little social life. I did not understand then why when I emerged from the theatre, I was shaken by feelings of anxiety: I thought perhaps it was the preoccupation of my conscious mind and reason with what occurred on the screen which permitted unexpected fear or nervousness to come to the surface, and it was only long after that I understood that precisely what occurred on the screen was the cause of my anxiety.

"When I did not go to the neighborhood theatre, I read novels, which was the same kind of appeasement of my unrealized desires. At that time when I was unhappy or bored before going to sleep, I went to the kitchen, found something good to eat, and returned to bed, eating and reading in bed, and thus, by this kind of pleasure and gratification, gaining a mild feeling of contentment before I hurled myself into the pit of sleep.

3.

"After a time (and again slowly) I began to drink in the evening. Since by this time I was married, this was not what is known as solitary drinking, though my wife did not drink with me, she did not drink at all. I used the elevation of being which came to me then to listen to music or to read books which, in the tiredness of evening, I would have found too taxing to the attention. Chiefly, however, and as the habit of drinking grew, I listened to phonograph records after I had reached a certain degree of drunkenness. (There must be some important connection between the pleasure of drinking and the pleasure of listening to music.) I liked concertos most of all, and this liking was, I think, the consequence of the special relationship between the virtuoso's instrument and the whole orchestra: sometimes he dominates the orchestra, sometimes he seems to struggle with it, sometimes the orchestra agrees with him loudly and fully. These relationships suggest to me (my mind is apt to over-interpret a good many things) the way in which such a self as mine inhabits the city and even the world.

"The consequence of this habit of drinking in the evening (at first I wondered a good deal about the evils of drinking; I wondered what they were, since, in fact, so much harmless pleasure occurred as the result of it), I stopped going to the motion-pictures./It would have been inconceivable to me that this should happen, since I had tried very hard for years not to go so frequently. The reason was nervousness. I became too nervous while I sat in the darkness of the theatre, because, having drunk a good deal before dinner, my whole being craved the support of liquor an hour after dinner. Jokingly, and then only half-jokingly, I said to my wife that I ought to get a flask to take with me to the pictures and then, when I became nervous, I would be able to go to the men's room to quiet myself by gulping down a little whiskey.

4.

My wife replied that if I went so far as to do this, she would stop
going to the theatre with me.
"ONE MUST DRAW THE LINE SOMETIMES
SHE SPOKES."

During this time I earned my living, which was modest but
adequate, by teaching in a city high school. It was not the kind of
a job I liked but it gave me enough time and enough economic security
to try to gain what I really wanted. What did I really want? Does it
make any difference what the particular aspiration was? Aspiration
is common enough to most of us, and the important thing to remember
about it, so far as I can make out, is that most aspirations worthy
of the name--perhaps ambitions would be a better term--are certain
to be disappointed. Most human beings are going to be failures,
though the whole community presses upon them the idea of competition
and the idea of gaining an enormous success which the newspapers
will celebrate. Perhaps, then, we ought to abandon the ideas of
success and failure. I am really serious in saying this and I have
thought about a great deal and considered the extent to which I
may be making my own plight and supposing that it is the same as
that of other human beings. To me this dismissal of success and
failure seems to be a revolutionary idea, and one which will bring
extraordinary benefits to mankind, benefits comparable to those of
the greatest inventions. And if you would have me say what should take
the place of success and failure as incentives, I should answer
love, but love of a certain kind, a kind which seldom is known. Once
success and failure no longer exist, and give the husband a certain
look and status to his wife and her relatives, love will be very
different for a good many human beings. How strange this idea
sounds! I can conceive of many interesting and important objections,
but all of them have inherent in them a disrespect, contempt, even
an ignorance of love. For how not turn away from love as from an
unpleasant or disgusting thing?