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“And how do you spend your… days?” “I walk and visit libraries and cinemas. When short of money I go to the security place. But most of the time I watch the sky from the balcony.” “And are you happy?” “No, but I’m content. There are nastier ways of living.” Sludden laughed. “No wonder you’ve a morbid obsession with daylight. Instead of visiting ten parties since you came here, laying ten women and getting drunk ten times, you’ve watched thirty days go by. Instead of making life a continual feast you chop it into days and swallow them regularly, like pills.” Lanark looked sideways at Sludden.
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“Have you visited Galloway’s Tearoom?” “Yes.” “Did you speak to anyone there?” “No.” “Then you can’t be a businessman. I’m afraid you’ll have to take up art. Art is the only work open to people who can’t get along with others and still want to be special.”
The directions on the cigarette packet led me to the house where I write this, thirty-one days later. I have not looked for work in that time or made friends, and I count the days only to enjoy their emptiness. Sludden thinks I am content with too little. I believe there are cities where work is a prison and time a goad and love a burden, and this makes my freedom feel worthwhile.
“You see, the only cure for these—personal—diseases is sunlight. Which our party is trying to restore. The artificially inflated land values at the centre have produced such overbuilding on the horizon that the sun is barely able to rise above it. As soon as we have a majority we can persuade the authorities to act.”
A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they’ve become completely human when they’ve only stopped trying.
“Of course you can’t! I asked foolishly. The lemon cannot taste bitterness, it only drinks the rain. Munro, describe Lanark to me.” “Obstinate and suspicious,” said Munro. “He has intelligence, but keeps it narrow.” “Good. I have a patient for him. Also obstinate, also suspicious, with a cleverness which only reinforces a deep, deep, immeasurably deep despair.”
“I’m over five and half feet tall and weigh about ten stone. My eyes are brown, hair black, and I forget the blood group. I used to be older than twenty but now I’m older than thirty. I’ve been called a crustacean, and too serious, but recently I was described by a dependable man as shrewd, obstinate and adequately intelligent. I was a writer once and now I’m a doctor, but I was advised to become these, I never wanted it. I’ve never wanted anything long. Except freedom.”
“We love each other! What could understanding add to that? We can’t understand ourselves, how can we understand others? Only maps and mathematics exist to be understood and we’re solider than those, I hope.”
“You were cured against the instructions of my department. The institute is a murder machine.” Noakes shook his head and sighed. “Ah, it could be easily destroyed if it was a simple murder machine. But it is like all machines, it profits those who own it, and nowadays many sections are owned by gentle, powerless people who don’t know they are cannibals and wouldn’t believe if you told them. It is also amazingly tolerant of anyone it considers human, and cures more people than you realize. Even the societies who denounce it would (most of them) collapse if it vanished, for it is an important
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At the height of the panic, while glaring at the irrelevant moon, his one thought had been a certainty that Hell was worse than this. He had not been religiously educated and though he had a tentative faith in God (saying at the end of prayers “If you exist” instead of “Amen”) he had none in Hell. Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail.
But now the fantasies were imbecile frivolity, and poetry was whistling in the dark, and novels showed life fighting its own agony, and biographies were accounts of struggles toward violent or senile ends, and history was an infinitely diseased worm without head or tail, beginning or end.
“Examinations!” cried Thaw. “It’s all examinations! Must everything we do satisfy someone else before it’s worthwhile? Is everything we do because we enjoy it selfish and useless? Primary school, secondary school, university, they’ve got the first twenty-four years of our lives numbered off for us and to get into the year above we’ve to pass an exam. Everything is done to please the examiner, never for fun. The one pleasure they allow is anticipation: ‘Things will be better after the exam.’ It’s a lie. Things are never better after the exam. You’d think love was something different. Oh, no. It
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“Thaw was not good at being happy.” The oracle said He was bad at it. “Yet that is almost a happy ending.” A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it.
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From under loose sweaters and tight blouses their breasts threaten my independence like the nosecaps of atomic missiles. Cannibal queens carnivorous nightingales why should I feel my value depends on being valued by women, what makes them the bestowers of value? Oh I want to grip them somehow and show them the universe is bigger, stranger, more sombre, colourful and distinct than they know.
“I never know where to sit. The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I’m never sure what square to go to. Yet it can’t be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.”
“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.” “Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some
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“So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life.” “No. That’s my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don’t.”
“Yah, I’m sick of ordinary people’s ability to eat muck and survive. Animals are nobler. A fierce animal will die fighting against insults to its nature, and a meek one will starve to death under them. Only human beings have the hideous versatility to adapt to lovelessness and live and live and live while being exploited and abused by their own kind. I read an essay by a little girl in a book about children in wartime. Her house had been bombed. She wrote,’ I am nothing and nobody. My cat was stuck to the wall. I tried to pull her off but they threw my cat away.’ Worse things have happened to
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But only a few old people remembered her youth nowadays and soon both her youth and her age would be wholly forgotten. He thought, ‘Oh no! No!’ and felt for the only time in his life a pang of pure sorrow without rage or self-pity in it. He could not weep, but a berg of frozen tears floated near his surface, and he knew that berg floated in everyone, and wondered if they felt it as seldom as he did.
“Do you find life a tragedy or really more of a joke?” Thaw laughed and said, “That depends on the part of it I’m looking at.”
His mural showed the warped rat-trap world of a neurotic virgin.
War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.”
“Good. You mentioned salary. Unluckily salaries are a vexed question with us. It’s impossible to pay a monthly or yearly sum when we can’t even measure the minutes and hours. Until the council sends us the decimal clocks it’s been promising for so long Unthank is virtually part of the intercalendrical zone. At present the city is kept going by force of habit. Not by rules, not by plans, but by habit. Nobody can rule with an elastic tape measure, can they?”
MONEY IS TIME. TIME IS LIFE. BUY MORE LIFE FOR YOUR FAMILY FROM THE QUANTUM INTERMINABLE. (THEY’LL LOVE YOU FOR IT.)
You probably think I’ve gone with Sludden because he has a big house, and is famous, and is a better lover than you in most ways, but that isn’t the real reason. It may surprise you to hear that Sludden needs me more than you do. I don’t think you need anybody. No matter how bad things get, you will always plod on without caring what other people think or feel. You’re the most selfish man I know.
“Oh, Lanark, I don’t like hurting you but I must explain why I’m leaving. You think I’m greedy and ungrateful and prefer Sludden because he’s a far better lover, but that’s not why. Women can live quite comfortably with a clumsy lover if he makes them happy in other ways. But you’re too serious all the time. You make my ordinary little feelings seem as fluffy and useless as bits of dust. You make life a duty, something to be examined and corrected.
“How will my story end?” “Catastrophically. The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason.”
“Exactly. Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough for us to steal the imaginative energy which gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. When I need more striking sentences or ideas I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own. Worst of all I am using the great world given at birth—the world of atoms—as a ragbag of shapes and colours
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My first hero was based on myself. I’d have preferred someone less specialized but mine were the only entrails I could lay hands upon. I worked poor Thaw to death, quite cold-bloodedly, because though based on me he was tougher and more honest, so I hated him. Also, his death gave me a chance to shift him into a wider social context. You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy.8 This makes you much more capable of action and slightly more capable of love.
Lanark smiled bitterly and thought, ‘The only feeling she gives me is stony pain, the pain of being slightly alive in a pot-bellied old body with thinning hair. But leaders need to be mostly dead. People want solid monuments to cling to, not confused men like themselves. Sludden was wise to send me. I can never melt.’
Another door closed and he lay down among whispers like falling leaves and felt his clothes removed. Someone whispered “Look!” and he opened his eyes long enough to meet a thin-lipped small smiling mouth in a glade of dark hair. Softly, sadly, he revisited the hills and hollows of a familiar landscape, the sides of his limbs brushing sweet abundances with surprisingly hard tips, his endings paddling in the pleats of a wet wound which opened into a boggy cave where little moans bloomed like violets in the blackness. There were dank odours and even a whiff of dung.
“Are you telling me that men lack the decency and skill to be good to each other?” “Not at all! Men have always possessed that decency and skill. In small, isolated societies they have even practised it. But it is a sad fact of human nature that in large numbers we can only organize against each other.” “You are a liar!” cried Lanark. “We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes
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“But only to cut short a useless argument. You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes. I cannot give prosperity to people whom my rich supporters cannot exploit.”
I STARTED MAKING MAPS WHEN I WAS SMALL SHOWING PLACE, RESOURCES, WHERE THE ENEMY AND WHERE LOVE LAY. I DID NOT KNOW TIME ADDS TO LAND. EVENTS DRIFT CONTINUALLY DOWN, EFFACING LANDMARKS, RAISING THE LEVEL, LIKE SNOW. I HAVE GROWN UP. MY MAPS ARE OUT OF DATE. THE LAND LIES OVER ME NOW. I CANNOT MOVE. IT IS TIME TO GO.
