Chapter XXXV

by Jack London

　　But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect,and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. Theold long sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness,recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again.But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts,intellectual in their inception, had been laid by a sane andnormal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of JohnBarleycorn, and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of hisraising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, onemust drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycornpromises but never delivers.

　　How to describe this White Logic to those who have neverexperienced it! It is perhaps better first to state how impossiblesuch a description is. Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the landof enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I havemade two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventuresthere are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have triedvainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny particular phaseto persons who have not travelled there.

　　I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries oftime and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain ineach interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quickjig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaboratingthat one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told themnothing. And when I cannot tell them this one thing of all thevastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know I have failed togive them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.

　　But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region,and at once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantlyto his mind what hours of words and phrases could not convey tothe mind of the non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn'srealm where the White Logic reigns. To those untravelled there,the traveller's account must always seem unintelligible andfantastic. At the best, I may only beg of the untravelled ones tostrive to take on faith the narrative I shall relate.

　　For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol.Philip sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seemto be various orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truthare truer than others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and thesesorts are the very ones that have the greatest use-value to lifethat desires to realise and live. At once, O untravelled reader,you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying todescribe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It isnot the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutelyshun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads thatlead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth thereare orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through whatseems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpsefaint far vistas of other lands and tribes.

　　Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normalis healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truthis a different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a drayhorse. Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first tolast, somehow, in unguessably dim ways, it must believe that lifeis good; that the drudgery in harness is good; that death, nomatter how blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; thatlife is beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fadinglife, it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond itssprained and spavined best; that old age, even, is decent,dignified, and valuable, though old age means a ribby scare-crowin a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumblingdizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration tothe end--the end, the apportionment of its parts (of its subtleflesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and allthe sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the hide-house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliserfactory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horsemust abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truthof life and that makes life possible to persist.

　　This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals,including man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, nomatter what the price. The game of life is good, though all oflife may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.This is the order of truth that obtains, not for the universe, butfor the live things in it if they for a little space will endureere they pass. This order of truth, no matter how erroneous itmay be, is the sane and normal order of truth, the rational order&f truth that life must believe in order to live.

　　To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awfulprivilege of reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate theintoxicating show of things and look upon the universe brazen withindifference toward him and his dreams. He can do this, but it isnot well for him to do it. To live, and live abundantly, to stingwith life, to be alive (which is to be what he is), it is goodthat man be life-blinded and sense-struck. What is good is true.And this is the order of truth, lesser though it be, that man mustknow and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude that it isabsolute truth and that in the universe no other order of truthcan obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value thecheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs ofsentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good thathe shall see neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled byhis lusts and rapacities.

　　And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other andtruer order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men havepassed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it anddeliberately to forget it to the end of their days. They lived.They realised life, for life is what they were. They did right.

　　And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon theimaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. JohnBarleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truthbeyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak asinterstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero,dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettablefact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liverlive. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist theparadox of being, until his victim cries out, as in "The City ofDreadful Night": "Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss."And the feet of the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold ofthe way of death.