The Oasis Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the socialist textbook—protection for minorities, opposition to wars and governments—and a third group, most recusant, tried to reject the whole of materialist doctrine and either to embrace religion or to assert, in small groups outside the main current, man’s power to dwell in relative harmony and justice. In most of thesedeviations, there was a common factor, an assumption of human freedom, which the realistic party felt it its duty to combat.
    In practice, of course, Taub and his friends conceded to anyone (this automatically excluded fascists and communists) the liberty of behaving as ineffectually as he wished. But the right of a human being to think that he could resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning was something they denied him with all the ferocity of their own pent-up natures and disappointed hopes. The idea that there was a loophole by which others were escaping while they themselves played trustees to the law of cause and effect drove them to a fury that they could hardly rationalize. Thus they were at once the victims and the masters of a doctrine of inevitability. The dictators of a diminishing circle of literary and political thinkers, they maintained the habit of authority by a subservience to events, demonstrating irrefutably that an occurrence that had already happened could not have happened otherwise and translating this security into predictions of the future. They had been for some time more or less inactive politically, and their materialism had hardened into a railing cynicism, yet they still retained from their Leninist days, along with the conception of history as arbiter, a notion of themselves as a revolutionary élite whose correctness in political theory allowed them the widest latitude in personal practice. The misdeeds, which they obstinately defended against the attacks of “morality” were, as amatter of fact, of the most trivial and commonplace character, quite lacking in social élan , yet the faction was committed to these failings as if to a higher principle. They could not repent them, though repentance might have afforded relief, and they could not embark openly upon a new course of conduct, lest their whole past, in this light, appear unjustified. They were thus in a desperate situation, for their position, while unassailable from without, offered any egress either. They had grown to dislike criticism so heartily that even self-criticism struck them as a form of lèse-majesté ; with crushing arguments, they refused the inner voice before it had finished speaking. This did not prevent them from feeling dissatisfied and unhappy, maligned and misunderstood; it only increased their sense of being surrounded by hostile forces. Time and age also, they felt, were conspiring to make them ridiculous; in business, once they had entrenched themselves in sinecures with an air of majestic astuteness, they soon found themselves discomfited precisely by their “executive” leisure and feared, above everything else, the eyes of their hard-working subordinates which seemed to be calculating their deficit on some impersonal adding machine.
    The necessity of going to an office, indeed, had become a source of genuine grievance with them. They felt positively imposed upon by the fact of an exploited class through whose room they were obliged to pass going and coming from lunch, arriving late on Mondays and leaving for the week-end on Thursdays.They were short and harsh with the typists, rude to the telephone girls; they slipped in and out without saying good day, found querulous fault with their secretaries, and beefed confidentially to them about the onerousness of the work. The more unpopular they knew themselves, the more they felt called upon to exercise—as a declaration of freedom—those very prerogatives which were the cause of resentment. All of this was quite at variance with their private characters, which were expansive and easy-going, if somewhat