The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Thoroughly disgruntled I said at last: "If only we had the courage of our innate madness, the courage of children, lunatics and men of genius, we should get some stamp paper, and stick a square beneath each photograph with our comments." Baudelaire describes how he dismissed a glass vendor because he had no coloured glasses--"glasses of rose and crimson, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise"--and, stepping out on to his balcony, threw a flowerpot down on the tray of glasses as soon as the man issued into the street below, shouting down furiously, "The Life Beautiful! The Life Beautiful." Bergson's theory is that laughter is a "social gesture" so that when a man in a top hat treads on a banana skin and slips down we laugh at him for his lack "of living pliableness." At this rate we ought to be profoundly solemn at Baudelaire's action and moreover a "social gesture" is more likely to be an expression of society's will to conformity in all its members rather than any dangerous "living pliableness." Society hates living pliableness and prefers drill, routine, orthodoxy, conformity. It hated the living pliableness of Turner, of Keats, of Samuel Butler and a hundred others. But to return to lunacy: the truth is we are all mad fundamentally and are merely schooled into sanity by education. Pascal wrote: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." And, in fact, the man who has succeeded in extirpating this intoxication of life is usually said to be "temporarily insane." In those melancholy interludes of sanity when the mind becomes rationalised we all know how much we have been deceived and gulled, what an extraordinary spectacle humanity presents rushing on in noise and tumult no one knows why or whither. Look at that tailor in his shop--why does he do it? Some day in the future he thinks he will.... But the day never comes and he is nevertheless content.