Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

‘Do you mind that? That I’m smart?’ ‘No,’ Arthur said. ‘Shit no. People are so fucking dumb these days it makes you want to cry.’

‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,’

‘When in doubt, forget it.’

And then the voice in me that comes from my childhood training says, ‘Don’t ask—relax.’ But I can’t relax.

I have never in my life seemed to see and hear and think so clearly. Can it be because I have not used drugs this day?

Everybody is so conditioned from childhood that nobody ever does anything.’

‘Don’t ask; relax.’

‘I did not choose my incarnation.’

‘The Age of Technology has rusted,’

‘Most people are too lazy,’ he said. ‘They only want distractions.’

Writing a book, I feel as a Talmudic scholar or an Egyptologist might have felt at Disneyland in the twentieth century.

‘No talking. Invasion of Privacy!’

I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry.

But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. ‘Don’t ask; relax.’

‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ for example, sounds much like our being taught to seek fulfillment only inwardly, through drugs and Privacy.

My old programming would say, ‘When in doubt, forget it.’ But I had to quiet that voice, too. Because it was wrong.

But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. ‘Give yourself to the Screen,’ they had taught us. It was as basic as ‘Don’t ask; relax.’ But I could no longer give myself to it.