From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

Framing the volute power of her life that no woman ever will acknowledge, he thought. Warden had a theory about women: For years he had been asking them to sleep with him, the ones that interested him. “Will you go to bed with me?” and they were always shocked, even the rummy barflies. Of course, they always did, but that was only later, after he had fulfilled the proper requirements of approach. No woman ever said, “Why, yes, I’d like to go to bed with you.” They couldn’t do it. It wasnt in them to be that honest. God damn their souls.

Prew watched him, feeling all around him that sunny buzzing inarticulateness that is nine-thirty in the morning on a duty day.

Warden had a theory about officers: Being an officer would make a sinner out of Christ himself. No man could swallow so much gaseous privilege and authority without having his guts inflated.

developments. In every war there were two wars, the war for officers and the war of the enlisted man.

“No,” Warden said. “Guess again. I dont make hell for nobody. I’m only the instrument of a laughing Providence. Sometimes I dont like it myself, but I couldnt help it if I was born smart.”

It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue.

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man’s lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smell of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper. He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because somewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.

But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you.

And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself.

Warden sighed. “I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army as an EM. Now what do you say we have another drink? Since we’ve settled the problems of God, Society, and the Individual I really think we rate another drink.”

“There,” he said helplessly. “There. There,” feeling the absurdity, the oppressive impossibility of any human being trying to communicate with and understand another’s mind in a life where nothing was ever what it seemed to be.

The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man’s life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say. The song of the one-eyed man who had driven the ox sled through the summer hills in the Kentucky mountains, the song of the Choctaw on his reservation, the song of the man who had laid the rollers for the stones heavy as death to build the glorious monument to the king. In the simple meaningless words he saw himself, and Chief Choate, and Pop Karelsen, and Clark, and Anderson, and Warden, each struggling with a different medium, each man’s path running by its own secret route from the same source to the same inevitable end. And each man knowing as the long line moved as skirmishers through the night woodsey jungle down the hill that all the others were there with him, each hearing the faint rustlings and straining to communicate, each wanting to reach out and share, each wanting to be known, but each unable, as Clark’s whining nasal was unable, to make it known that he was there, and so each forced to face alone whatever it was up ahead, in the unmapped alien enemy’s land, in the darkness.

Mazzioli and the other clerks who congregated mornings at Choy’s to discuss Art and Life were blind. He knew them, so involved in intricate conversation, so secure in pointless argument, they could not see the thing they sought to grasp lay right before them, all around them, and could be touched only momentarily, but never grasped and held by any sharp dissection. It spoke now from the bottomless shallows of a hillbilly song that in its artless simplicity said everything their four-dollar words could never say, went back to a basic simplicity that gave a sudden flashing picture of all life that could never be explained and an understanding of it that could never be expressed.

Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth, they alone can never buy it. You take one man’s word, because he knows, and then you find the next man tells you just the opposite just as surely, and he knows too.

“Is it so important?” Lorene teased. “Yes, its important,” he said urgently. “Important because there are so many of us; thats just faces, to you. So many of you that aint even faces, only just bodies, to us. Do you want to be just a unremembered body? When we come here and then go away we need to know at least that we’re remembered. Maybe we seem all alike but none of us is ever all alike. Men are killed by being always all alike, always unremembered. They die inside. Wives earn their money that way just as much as whores do, with this crappy imitation that aint no good but has to work because usually its all there is. But it dries up the well and leaves it nothing but a mudhole, makes it just rich blood poured down a strawy rathole that stinks afterwards, unless you are remembered. We dont ask to be needed, all we ask is to be remembered. Just to be remembered is …”

These were all part of it, he felt, looking down; important parts, as small memories are important parts of the life of a man, parts of your chosen heritage, even of your destiny maybe, small functioning parts of this tiny solar system that is the company that is lost among the galaxies of regiments that make up this universe that is the Army, the parts that give meaning to the only universe you know, he thought, the only universe you want, because it is the only one you ever found a place in yet. And now you are rapidly losing that.

Yet he knew that those results could and would come out of it for him. You cant disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing, look at the Nazis, and that is why they tie their lives to things.

You could not handle this time like the last time. This was stronger. This was the last time squared, and you would have to square the strength of your approach, and then if you waited till the other’s peak was past, then logically you would have it made, but was it worth it? Hell no, it wasnt worth it, not when you might crimp your own concatenation, what was it to you if some damned son of a bitching stupid fool of an antediluvian got himself beheaded by a progressive world by going around in a dream world and trying to live up to a romantic, backward ideal of individual integrity? You could go doing things for a jerk like that forever, and never help him any. It was never worth it, but it would really be a feather in your cap if you could pull it off again now, this time. That would be worth a try, just for the hell of it. If he was doing this, it was not because it was his responsibility to knock himself out taking care of headless chickens who refuse to become modern and grow a head, it was just for the fun of seeing if he could pull it off, not for no stupid ass who still believed in probity.

He had given up entirely the idea of curing them or teaching them a lesson. He no longer hoped for or expected instantaneous victory. When The Treatment started right where it had left off yesterday, and he went right back into the role of perfect soldier, he was only fighting a holding action, and under the slow smouldering silence of the self-generated hate that was his one defense was only the thought of Lorene and Payday, warming through him like a good stiff drink, a fire at which he could warm himself against this heat of hatred that was slowly freezing him.

Here, he thought, just here, and only here, held in these pieces of pasteboard being tossed facedown around the table, governed by whatever Laws or fickle Goddess moved them, here lay infinity and the secret of all life and death, what the scientists were seeking, here under your hand if you could only grasp it, penetrate the unreadability. You may shortly win $1000. You may more shortly be completely broke. And any man who could just only learn to understand the reason why would be shaking hands with God. They were playing table stakes and in front of the winners lay thick piles of greenbacks weighted down with silver. The sight of all this crisp green paper that was so important in this life swept him with a greediness to take these crinkly good smelling pieces of paper to himself, not for what they would buy but for their lovely selves. All this was contained in the slow, measured, inexorable dropping of the cards, like time beating slowly but irresistibly in the ears of an old man.

“The trouble with you, Pete,” the voice that did not seem to come from him but from the cigaret said savagely, “is you cant see any further than that douchebag nose of yours. You concern yourself with the petty details of life in order not to think, like whether or not to wear them goddam teeth of yours if you think a cunt is gunna see you—just like the goddam housewives in my brother’s parish with their makeup when they’re going to confession. While the whole damn world is rocketing to hell you got to go back and get your fucking teeth. Whynt you go get in the goddam church and hold hands with the padre and pray for peace, you’re at about that age now, and you’re suffering from the same disease that afflicts the rest of the human race.”

He could hear this faintly through the skintight space suit of plexiglass he was encased in, sealed in, a perfect example of the Twentieth Century Man doing his calisthenics to keep healthy and not lose his figure, in his airtight, soundproof, loveproof, hateproof, lifeproof plexiglass space suit that was a marvel of modern industrial accomplishment, a masterpiece of modern industrial engineering design, there should be at least two in every home, and then one each for all the little ones, because a Twentieth Century Man looked so silly naked with his shoes and socks still on, a muscle-knotty squirrel divested of its skin but the footpads not cut off yet. But he was goddamned, stinking slucking goddamned, if he would tell her, now, how he could not come back tomorrow because he had had to borrow twenty from the twenty per cent men, also a marvel of modern industrial accomplishment, to come today at all, and that he would not have the dough to come again tomorrow. Besides, he would have to yell too loud to make it heard outside the plexiglass space suit anyway.

“Its Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor,” Hal said quickly. “Very common stuff. Its one of that old drunk’s specialties. Some pseudo-intellectual is always asking for it. Trés chic,” he said.

There were times when Prewitt felt a special quality in himself, a strange unpleasant quality that seemed to force everyone he touched into making drastic decisions about their own lives, no wonder people did not like to be around him. The idea frightened him deeply, at such times, because he could not understand what it was and because he did not want to do it. Certainly, he did not try to do it. People went along, living their lives as best they could, not gaining much maybe, but not losing greatly either, and all the time, deeply hidden, the one great personal conflict of fear lay dormant and unhidden. Enter Kid Galahad Prewitt. The action precipitates. The conflict of fear rises flapping from the depths like a giant manta ray, looming big and bigger, looming huge, up out of the deep green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arc down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and the ego caught square in the middle. And they had to choose, had to face it, and whichever way they chose they still got hurt. And all the time he did not want to do it, did not know he did it, until afterwards. It always frightened him, thinking this way, it was one of the things he could most of the time keep down, out of his mind, but sometimes it was too hard to keep the mind going in smooth even waves and he had to let it in and the mind started jumping around yawingly as if there we...

all charging up the stairs together, before the buildings around the quad had quit playing catch with the echo of the shot as it died away.

That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

If the Government was getting ready for a war in July of 1941, that was not the same as being in one. That it was bound to come eventually did not mean it would be here tomorrow. It would take something pretty big, before the country would be willing to get in; and all the rifles in the world did not make a war-Army until you had talked the people into shooting them.

You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.

He could have argued that one, but it was useless to argue once it was gone, argument only drove it further away, he knew from experience you could not arouse whatever it was by argument and the best he would get would only be the ice statue again all locked up inside, and the ice statue wasnt worth even the argument let alone the energy, so he did not argue; instead he lay in the bed while she went out to fix breakfast, feeling a hot fever all over that had absolutely nothing to do with the sore side and that greatly colored the mental movies until they had nothing to do with love at all, this fever that burned up all the meat (called Love) and left only the bare bones (called whatever it was the Hays Office called it, Rut maybe, Lust probably, raw hot bloody Lust) that were the skeleton under the meat of every man’s love no matter how much they denied it, and that could be satisfied anywhere anyway anywho (although the women always stoutly refused to believe this and were therefore the Board Founders and Charter Designers of the whorehouse male and female that they decried), but that he could not get up and go satisfy now, so he just lay in the bed with the burning hot fever that had nothing to do with his sore side, and listened to her fix breakfast.

Married life, his mind told him indignantly, appears to be vastly similar to the bracketing in of a battery of 155’s. First a long that goes over, then a short that goes under, then a long and a short and a long and a short, a see and a saw and an up and a down, each a little bit closer to target, until finally we are in and we lay down our barrage and we’re married. A constant roaring, marriage, in which the individual explosions are no longer even distinguishable so that it itself even finally tapers off into monotony and boredom, leaving only a charred churned-up countryside in which there is nothing alive anymore. Not even the parakeets that once rose up in white clouds screeching out of the jungle, every time a bracket shell dropped. The bracketing-in always use to be fun, remember? But laying a barrage, that begins to wear after a while. Whether you’re the Artilleryman on the guncrew, or the Infantryman lying out under it. Even the excitement of almost dying loses its appeal after a while and subsides into just gloom.