The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page B

from all others of its kind. They hampered friendship by taking its special vocabulary and distributing it as largesse among all human beings, so that it could not perform its function of building up strong preferences. They themselves paid a price for this, for all their relationships were in a constant state of flux; inseparables of a fortnight ago would today speak only about and not to each other. But this they did not mind, for they were dedicated people who, the better to serve this intention, had taken vows of wealth, unchastity, and disobedience to all standards. No vows are easy to keep, since they demand a quality of persistence which the human race does not possess, and these votaries failed as frequently as any others. They all carried on so far as they were able a machine-gun-like succession of disbursements for goods which did not endure, such as food and drink and hotel accommodation and the attendance of world-famous and epicene hairdressers, or some hours at the baccara table, and thus did their part in reducing the monetary system to sheer nonsense; but a considerable proportion fell by the wayside, and found themselves in an impoverished condition that any Franciscan might have envied. These lapsed cases excited just such censoriousness among some of their fellow votaries, and in others just such a kindly determination to lift them up and restore them to the right path, as they would have found had they committed their faults as members of an ascetic organization.
    They were perhaps happier in their campaign against chastity. It seemed to be much more successfully conducted. Isabelle was startled to find how many of the women had had Marc as a lover. He always betrayed it when he introduced them to her by the pensiveness of his terrier eyes, a penitent protrusion of his lower lip, and a disposition to smack them on the behind, a part of the body which, in the female, he regarded as symbolical of that which was urgent yet not important. But she was still more startled to find that, although all these people knew that she and Marc had been married only a few weeks, several of the women showed signs of desiring to renew or initiate relations with Marc, and several of the men offered to seduce her. This was not because they were wickedly perverse, but because they lived in a sexual universe in which all frontiers had been broken down, including those of time, and it was not less likely that people would commit adultery on their honeymoon than at any other time.
    But here, too, there were lapses. Outbreaks of love paralysed free sexual exchange, and both satiety and age inexorably worked for abstinence. But there could be no question but that unchastity was a far easier discipline to follow than disobedience to all standards. That meant waging a constant battle with the flesh and the spirit, for man is an inveterately theorizing animal, who cannot look out of his eyes without basing opinions on what he sees, and basing on those opinions preferences and parties and flaming loyalties and steely repudiations, and, in fact, the formation of standards and obedience to them. These votaries did what they could to stop the trouble at the source by softening what their eyes showed them, through the constant self-administration of small doses of alcohol. Many of them never became actually drunk, and those that did were usually sober enough until evening, but nearly all made a practice of sitting down the minute they had finished their swimming or their motor-boat racing, or their surf-riding, and drinking enough cocktails to dilute the universe round them, to rob it of its power, and to prevent it taking advantage of their momentary disengagement from physical preoccupations. They practised, too, a resolute canalization towards personal ends of all their emotions, even of the sorts that one had thought inextricably associated with the intellect. The passion which men bring to debates regarding free will and determinism, or