Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of LifeDreiser, Theodore
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Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
Dreiser, Theodore
American essays -- 20th century
Equation, then, is that which is involved in the lust of the lover for
his sweetheart, and her acceptance; the husband for his wife, and her
faith; the mother for her child, and its love; the citizen for his
neighbor; the individual for his friend. Art, the love of life for
itself, is nothing more than a synthesis of many equations whereby many
lovely harmonies and their opposites are expressed or implied. Hunger,
balanced against satiation, creates more beauty. Life builds and wills
far beyond the ken of man or his companion animals, and all that he can
know is the chemic thrill of life, its joys, the necessity of equation
and so-called fair play, or rhythm and balance. For, behold, life is
ever dancing and does not will to be still. Not to want too much,
because one cannot get too much; not to seek to devour the whole world,
because one cannot; not to threaten, because of vanity and
self-appreciation, all else with extermination, because one cannot
possibly exterminate all else without disturbing the general balance and
so bring the weight, the conditioning and crushing force of equation
itself upon oneself, is to say what may offend the individual life-lover
but which nevertheless produces the only condition in which the general
totality in all its glittering variety, which it appears to crave, can
best express itself outside Nirvana. And this it is which should drive
the fog of religious theory out of our minds.
For why pray in beggarly fashion for that which will be, whether we pray
or not--which, as the mechanists believe and show cannot escape its own
destiny? Rather sing and be joyful, I should say, for one’s unescapable
share in so great a spectacle. The game is open, free, a thrashing,
glorious scene. Our God, if we have one, is not a namby-pamby,
milk-and-water solution, suitable for the stomachs and optics of still
more namby-pamby men, but a vast somewhat which offers a splendid
universe-eating career to the giant, if he wills, an opportunity to
thrive and grow to even the most spindling of beginners. Our God, if we
have one, is a vast somewhat too great for the perception or
understanding or destruction or solution of any minor portion of Him,
such as we are. He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of
thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its,
least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No
attributes such as man can conceive can apply--neither good nor evil,
virtue or its opposite--for these apply only as mild suggestions at
moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our
God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless
opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is
extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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