The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell

say?—more fruitful disturbance. You were unhappy before the war too, you say. As a puritan living unpuritanly you would have been. You found an inability to enjoy because your education, with its gentlemanly prohibitions, had taught you merely how to endure. Sometimes—” here Hogarth affectionately put his arm round the shoulders of the younger man. “Sometimes, Baird, I think there is only politics left for you—the last refuge of the diseased ego. You notice how all the young men are burning to reform things? It’s to escape the terrible nullity and emptiness and guilt of the last six years. They are now going to nationalize everything, including joy, sex and sleep. There will be enough for everyone now because the Government will control it. Those who can’t sleep will be locked up.”
    They walked in silence for a quarter of a mile along the deserted Embankment, their footsteps sounding hollow in the crisp night air.
    â€œAnd yet,” pursued Hogarth, “I think I see also symptoms of a purely metaphysical disturbance going on too; you are not alone, you know, in anything except the fact that it has chosen a single incident from your own life to illustrate what is common to the whole of your generation. I tell you everywhere the young men are sleeping with the night-light burning. You ask me about Böcklin and I say this is less interesting than that other feeling which you have been telling me about—what the old Abbot called ‘pins and needles of the soul’ and Böcklin himself called ‘ Gleichgultigkeit ’. It seems to me that this sharpening of focus, this aridity of feeling, this sense of inner frustration, must be leading to a kind of inner growth at the end of which lies mystical experience. Now you are laughing at me again.” He placed his pork-pie hat firmly on his head and walked a few steps in silence. “It seems to me that when you have exhausted action (which is always destructive) and people and the material things, there comes a great empty gap. That is what you have reached—the great hurdle which stands on this side of the real joyous life of the inside self. Then comes illumination—dear, oh dear. I know it sounds nonsense, but it’s the poverty of language that is at fault. What do you think the medical term for William Blake would be? A euphoric? A hysterical pycnik? It’s too absurd. The next few years will be a crisis not only for you but your generation too. You are approaching spiritual puberty—the world is. It is hard going I know—but there is always worse ahead, I have found. Yet there is a merciful law by which nothing heavier than you can bear is ever put upon you. Remember it! It is not the burden which causes you pain—the burden of excessive sensibility—but the degree of your refusal to accept responsibility for it. That sets up a stress and conflict. It sounds balls, doesn’t it? Well, so does St. John of the Cross, I suppose.”
    They stopped at an early coffee-stall and ordered the plate of sausage and mash that Hogarth so loved to eat before he caught his last tram back to Balham. They smiled at each other over a cup of steaming coffee and wrangled good-naturedly about who should pay.
    â€œAdmit it,” said Hogarth. “I’m talking about something that you don’t understand at all. Gibberish, eh?”
    Baird shook his head. “It sounds like sense—with a fourth dimension added to it. It reminds me a good deal of the Californian prophets, Huxley, Maugham, et alia. ”
    â€œAh,” said Hogarth, “the propaganda squad.”
    â€œThe sphere and navel group. New World Taoists.”
    â€œWell, you are not very far wrong; for although I think some of them have the answer, it often represents little more than a retrenchment upon an original pragmatism. Dealing in revelation, they obviously lack the true illumination. Why? Because if they had