Page 101 - The Myth and the Moment

Evening

My idea was to keep you from self-destructing. I went cruising up
Santa Monica and Sunset and Hollywood, hoping to spot you on the
sidewalk. Finally decided to drive up the hill to Phil’s place; lights
were off at his house, but a lot of water was running down his
driveway into the street.”
“Hee-hee-hee. Must be watering his lawn.”
“You know he’s got no lawn, Evangelino. Some of that flood was
coming out from under his fancy front door. Looked to me like a
serious plumbing problem. And I ain’t no volunteer pipe-fitter. So I
came back down to Sunset and headed east. And there you were.”
Quite plausible.
“Well, then, thanks, Ham. Tell me: who actually broke into my
place and stole The Myth?”
“I can’t finger the guy, Nate. Don’t ask me to do that. I was just a
sort of lookout; he’s a semi-pro, knows Phil for a long time. After he
was out of there, I went over to the park to pursue my own interests.
No sense in wasting a trip to MacArthur Park. Say, what did you call
your thing: a myth? What kind of manifesto is that?”
“Just forget about politics, Ham. It’s not a justification for fighting
the system. Phil thought it had a dollar value; it doesn’t. Aestheria
probably thinks I’m some kind of mad visionary, but I’m not that,
either. I’m just trying to pass on my view of things to the future. You
may not think much about the likelihood of humankind being wiped
out in the next five minutes, but I take it very seriously.”
“You think I don’t?”
“Okay, okay, so I don’t know you well enough to make such an
assertion. But I will grant you that you’re a sort of ad hoc
existentialist. No, no, let me explain. The significant variables in
philosophy, explicit or not, are the myth and the moment. Most
people, thanks to their conditioning, are living a myth: some larger-
than-life belief that bestows value and meaning upon everything.
That’s a myth of momentlessness; pure experience for those people is
always overlaid with so much intellectual—and logically invalid—
interpretation that moments do not exist for them. The flip-side of
that combination is the myth of the moment only; that is, a total
commitment to sensory experience, based on the simple-minded
proposition that nothing else is significant, that any search for
knowledge or work for justice is foolish or pointless. That sort of

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