Page 172 - tender-is-the-night

Blackstick in Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, ‘is a little
misfortune.’
In some moods he griped at his own reasoning: Could I
help it that Pete Livingstone sat in the locker-room Tap Day
when everybody looked all over hell for him? And I got an
election when otherwise I wouldn’t have got Elihu, knowing
so few men. He was good and right and I ought to have sat
in the locker-room instead. Maybe I would, if I’d thought I
had a chance at an election. But Mercer kept coming to my
room all those weeks. I guess I knew I had a chance all right,
all right. But it would have served me right if I’d swallowed
my pin in the shower and set up a conflict.
After the lectures at the university he used to argue this
point with a young Rumanian intellectual who reassured
him: ‘There’s no evidence that Goethe ever had a ‘conflict’
in the modern sense, or a man like Jung, for instance. You’re
not a romantic philosopher— you’re a scientist. Memory,
force, character—especially good sense. That’s going to be
your trouble—judgment about yourself— once I knew a
man who worked two years on the brain of an armadillo,
with the idea that he would sooner or later know more about
the brain of an armadillo than any one. I kept arguing with
him that he was not really pushing out the extension of the
human range—it was too arbitrary. And sure enough, when
he sent his work to the medical journal they refused it—
they had just accepted a thesis by another man on the same
subject.’
Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles’ heels than would
be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty—the il-

172 Tender is the Night