Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel—a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.

‘There was Julius Caesar and Tolstoy and Immanuel Kant. But now it’s all robots. Robots and the pleasure principle. Everybody’s head is a cheap movie show.’

And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.

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

I think the ocean means most to me on rain days, when the water and sky are gray. There is a sandy beach below the cliff; its tan color looks beautiful against the gray water. And the white birds in the gray sky! My heart beats noticeably when I even imagine it, here in my cell. And it is sad, like the horse with the hat on its head in the old film, like King Kong falling—so slowly, so softly, so far—and like the words that I now say aloud: ‘Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.’

Distant and clear in the pale dawn it stood, higher than anything else outside: the Empire State Building, the high grave marker for the city of New York.

When literacy died, so had history.

The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and

It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile prepared the way for the more profound—more inward—dependencies upon television and then robots and, finally, the ultimate and predictable conclusion to all of it: the perfection of the chemistry of mind.

‘It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.’

‘God grant us safety from the fallout past and the fallout to come. Preserve us from all Detectors. Grant us thy love and keep us from the sin of Privacy.

‘May the Directors make me grow inwardly. May I move through Delight and Serenity to Nirvana. May I be untouched by all outside…’

My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men. I wish I could be writing these words down, instead of dictating them. For it must be writing, as much as reading, that has given me this strong sense of my new self.