Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

the kind of relativism that reduces ‘the good’ to ‘the habitual.’ And what’s more important, both of us maintain—though by a different chain of argument—that the life of an organism constitutes its standard of value. What promotes and enhances the organism’s life is ‘good’ and what threatens its life is ‘evil.’ That much we have in common, but in the end there’s all the difference in the world between Rand’s ideas and mine.” He broke off and shrugged, suspecting he was growing tiresome.

“Such as?” she asked. She sat poised, half smiling, delicately balanced—as it seemed to him—between interest in what he had to say and fear that he would lecture all night.

Mickelsson sucked his cheeks in, hunting for a way to put it briefly. “Well,” he said, “such as this. I claim that by our very nature human beings value the idea of human life more than we value our individual lives. That’s what I sometimes call the Nietzchean ‘foundational moral experience,’ the immediate human sense of life’s sacred quality, if you know what I mean—the explanation of the way our hearts lift when we hear of examples of the so-called ‘supreme sacrifice.’ Soldiers who die to save their buddies, things like that. Ayn Rand thinks survival is an absolute value, which it is, rightly understood. What she fails to see is that individual survival is a relative value, at least for highly evolved life-forms—us, whales, dolphins maybe, probably gorillas. … Nietzsche says somewhere, ‘The world is full of things people will die for.’ It’s obviously true. What I’ve done is help explain why. It’s an important idea, especially just now, in this stupid, pragmatic, improvisational age—”

One moment her thoughts seemed miles away; the next, Jessica was saying (diving at him like an eagle, he thought): “Your hands are shaking.”

“It’s true,” he said, looking, abruptly laughing. “I get fired up.”

“I think you’re angry at yourself,” she said, studying him with that cool, level gaze of hers. “But I’m not sure why, yet.”

“You’re very psychological, you people of the tribe of Freud. If I see evil and stupidity in the world, you check out my potty-training.” All at once, as if he’d decided it was time to leave (he’d decided nothing), he stood up. Then, as if on second thought, he drifted around the coffeetable and the couch she sat on and moved with his pipe to the French doors. She sat behind him now. He did not turn to see if she were watching him. The doors opened onto her back yard and garden: immense dark trees against a starry sky, below them shapes he couldn’t identify, flowers or bushes, something that might be a grape arbor. When he lit his pipe, the face that briefly glowered back at him from the glass was unexpectedly puffy, disheveled. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said. He shook out the match, then gestured impatiently. Dissertation and committee work, university politics, reviewing, the editing of unimportant articles and books by other people, the teaching of courses in which, especially of late, he felt no interest … And as for his true work, his philosophical writing … Deep down, he believed the worst his unfriendly reviewers had to say of him. He was fond of quoting Collingwood’s line: “All widespread errors contain some truth.” Clearly there was, at some level, something very wrong with the philosophy of Peter Mickelsson. Such a mood did not make continued effort—Hegel’s aufheben, Nietzsche’s sublimieren—an easy leap.

He turned toward the couch, where she sat perfectly still, not as relaxed as she pretended, watching him. “Middle age,” he said, and gestured vaguely. (He had a definite pot belly and touches of dead yellow and iron gray in his hair; he had a forehead as wide and flat as a bull’s, three or four broken vessels in his cheeks from too much drinking. …)

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“What?”

“Why did you sigh like that, just now?”

“Did I?” He grinned, lest her concern steal too much advantage.

She met his eyes. Her eyes, normally gray, were black now, stalking the darkness where he hid. “Were you thinking about your wife?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.” He had not been. “I suppose I was.” After a moment, he nodded. He remembered that Jessica’s husband had died.

She asked, “What do you think went wrong? Were you to blame?”

Mickelsson pulled his lower lip up in between his teeth and tensed his forehead, tempted by her friendly curiosity, knowing they weren’t playing the same game. He glanced at her. She was smiling—queenly, he thought: Scheherazadelike—and in some not quite sexual way seductive. She reached past her skirt and feet to pat the couch. “Come sit,” she said.

He moved toward her, turning over possibilities behind the mask of his smile.

“Why the guilt?” she asked. “Did you leave her for someone else?”

“No,” he said, “certainly not.” He ran his hand over his face. “It’s true that I cheated on her, as they say. I hurt her plenty, and plenty of times.”

“And did she cheat?” Jessica asked.

He breathed deeply, then put down his pipe, put his elbows on his knees, and lowered his head into his hands. If he told her all this he would certainly lie; how could he not? He’d do everything in his power to make himself look good, seduce this beautiful soft creature beside him with his pretended virtue, and then hate himself more, and eventually get found out and be hated for his lies or, worse, pitied. … He was painfully conscious of Jessica’s foot just inches from his leg. His penis stirred, waking up.

“She started it,” he said at last, almost a whimper.

After a moment he felt her foot touch the side of his leg.

“So why the guilt?” she asked. “Why all the misery?”

Tears came to his eyes—guilt, self-hatred, an ache of desire he was afraid to act on, even half drunk as he was.

“Wouldn’t it help to talk about it?” she asked. She let him sit silent awhile, then asked, “You still love her,