that occurred to him was what to his comrades, and many others, is the epitome of all humor. “Is it up your ass, maybe?”
“But Mr. P.!” giggled the wife of the clothing-store manager.
“I’m not playing,” said the schoolteacher. “I don’t play with people who don’t know anything about polite behavior,” he declared virtuously.
But he did play. They forced him to, and it lasted all the way to Pardubice, where he and the manager of the clothing store got off. It was the greatest fun that this parlor game had ever given me or the hot-shot or the wife of the draftsman, because it wasn’t fun, it was the mill of God grinding him between its stone wheels. Slowly, with an immense series of silly questions that finally lost all semblance of system, he got himself into the mental state known in boxing circles as “punch-drunk.” With questions like “Does it stink?” he elicited a remarkable and copious flow of sarcasmfrom the soul of the hot-shot, whose brightly colored socks rose more and more frequently like fireworks toward the ceiling. With the question “Is it anything at all?” he gave me food for thought, because I truly didn’t know what it was, this schoolteacher, lifelong proclaimer of a morality that was founded on no law whatsoever, not Christ’s, not Marx’s, and himself living without morality, without even the morality of a human animal which recognizes the ageless law of the herd — don’t do things you don’t want people to do to you — living a life without meaning or content, a mere system of bowels and reflexes, more pitiful than a silky little hamster caught in a cage, trying in vain with its pink claws to dig its way out through the metal cage floor, to the only thing of value — sweet freedom. This creature here didn’t need freedom, which is certainly of supreme value in our life but cannot be achieved except in the wisdom that understands our necessity, even though he often spouted the word “freedom” at Party meetings; he didn’t need the freedom that we need to remain sane if we are human beings, because he wasn’t human. Naturally there is no such thing as a superman, but it always seemed to me that there is such a thing as a subman. He exists, he is among us for all the days of the world, like Jesus’s poor, except that the submen aren’t poor. Small or large, fat or skinny mammals unfamiliar with love, fidelity, honesty, altruism — all thosevirtues and attributes that make up a human being and justify the survival of the species of animals and men (conscious in humans, unconscious in animals, in armadillos, or white mice that in their natural state would never in all their short lives think of killing each other) — who with no qualms assert the absolute priority of their bellies, their imagined (but to them indisputable) rights, and broadcast their own inanity in speeches about their infallibility, always ready to judge others, to condemn others, not for an instant doubting their own perfection, not for a moment contemplating the meaning of their own existence, deriding Christianity and morality as outdated but in the depths of their souls hating Communism, which robs them of the freedom to be parasites, although some occasionally even win out over that because they find they can sponge off it equally well, and they never realize that they are simply a terrible emptiness bounded by skin and bone, leaving in their wake traces of lesser or greater pain, ruined lives, wrecked existences, jobs spoiled, tasks undone, wretched divorces, crimes, and dull and sordid cynicism. They are the ones for whom hell and eternal punishment must exist, at least the punishment of human memory, if everything in the world is not to become one immense injustice, because perhaps not even the entire future of Communism-come-to-pass can make up for the oceans of sufferingthey have precipitated upon the world in the eight or nine thousand years of their existence, for the subhumans
“But Mr. P.!” giggled the wife of the clothing-store manager.
“I’m not playing,” said the schoolteacher. “I don’t play with people who don’t know anything about polite behavior,” he declared virtuously.
But he did play. They forced him to, and it lasted all the way to Pardubice, where he and the manager of the clothing store got off. It was the greatest fun that this parlor game had ever given me or the hot-shot or the wife of the draftsman, because it wasn’t fun, it was the mill of God grinding him between its stone wheels. Slowly, with an immense series of silly questions that finally lost all semblance of system, he got himself into the mental state known in boxing circles as “punch-drunk.” With questions like “Does it stink?” he elicited a remarkable and copious flow of sarcasmfrom the soul of the hot-shot, whose brightly colored socks rose more and more frequently like fireworks toward the ceiling. With the question “Is it anything at all?” he gave me food for thought, because I truly didn’t know what it was, this schoolteacher, lifelong proclaimer of a morality that was founded on no law whatsoever, not Christ’s, not Marx’s, and himself living without morality, without even the morality of a human animal which recognizes the ageless law of the herd — don’t do things you don’t want people to do to you — living a life without meaning or content, a mere system of bowels and reflexes, more pitiful than a silky little hamster caught in a cage, trying in vain with its pink claws to dig its way out through the metal cage floor, to the only thing of value — sweet freedom. This creature here didn’t need freedom, which is certainly of supreme value in our life but cannot be achieved except in the wisdom that understands our necessity, even though he often spouted the word “freedom” at Party meetings; he didn’t need the freedom that we need to remain sane if we are human beings, because he wasn’t human. Naturally there is no such thing as a superman, but it always seemed to me that there is such a thing as a subman. He exists, he is among us for all the days of the world, like Jesus’s poor, except that the submen aren’t poor. Small or large, fat or skinny mammals unfamiliar with love, fidelity, honesty, altruism — all thosevirtues and attributes that make up a human being and justify the survival of the species of animals and men (conscious in humans, unconscious in animals, in armadillos, or white mice that in their natural state would never in all their short lives think of killing each other) — who with no qualms assert the absolute priority of their bellies, their imagined (but to them indisputable) rights, and broadcast their own inanity in speeches about their infallibility, always ready to judge others, to condemn others, not for an instant doubting their own perfection, not for a moment contemplating the meaning of their own existence, deriding Christianity and morality as outdated but in the depths of their souls hating Communism, which robs them of the freedom to be parasites, although some occasionally even win out over that because they find they can sponge off it equally well, and they never realize that they are simply a terrible emptiness bounded by skin and bone, leaving in their wake traces of lesser or greater pain, ruined lives, wrecked existences, jobs spoiled, tasks undone, wretched divorces, crimes, and dull and sordid cynicism. They are the ones for whom hell and eternal punishment must exist, at least the punishment of human memory, if everything in the world is not to become one immense injustice, because perhaps not even the entire future of Communism-come-to-pass can make up for the oceans of sufferingthey have precipitated upon the world in the eight or nine thousand years of their existence, for the subhumans
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