From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [400]
The masterpiece was made, created. When you go on creating on a masterpiece that is already created you dont make it more of a masterpiece, you unmake it. You go on spending the rest of your life changing semi-colons to commas and commas to semi-colons.
So this is what you are condemning us both to? his mind said. Me, your best friend?
They both knew it. It was just that neither wanted to be the first to admit it because they both felt too guilty about always making each other pay for something. Besides, they didnt have any other blueprint to go by. They told you love was the end. But love wasnt the end. But they didnt tell you where to go next. If only they could stop and not go on creating. But who ever saw a human being who could stop and not go on creating?
Married life, his mind told him indignantly, appears to be vastly similar to the bracketing in of a battery of 155’s. First a long that goes over, then a short that goes under, then a long and a short and a long and a short, a see and a saw and an up and a down, each a little bit closer to target, until finally we are in and we lay down our barrage and we’re married. A constant roaring, marriage, in which the individual explosions are no longer even distinguishable so that it itself even finally tapers off into monotony and boredom, leaving only a charred churned-up countryside in which there is nothing alive anymore. Not even the parakeets that once rose up in white clouds screeching out of the jungle, every time a bracket shell dropped. The bracketing-in always use to be fun, remember? But laying a barrage, that begins to wear after a while. Whether you’re the Artilleryman on the guncrew, or the Infantryman lying out under it. Even the excitement of almost dying loses its appeal after a while and subsides into just gloom.
The only real relief either one of them had got from the other in the whole 10 days was the night they went in town to the luau.
That was, of course, if you did not count the whiskey, the case of I. W. Harper he had bought the first day in town while waiting for her, and that she had given him hell for buying, but which later on she had drunk at least half of, sitting in the two luxurious rooms with the eight luxurious walls.
During the past three or four months, his mind grinned sardonically, in which you have been so busy, having had nothing else better to do, I have occupied myself with making a searching and profound study of the institution of married life as practiced in these United States, somewhat in the manner of the psychiatrists who write those articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Oh, yes; dont look surprised; didnt you know; sex is an open topic in the United States now. Would you care in hear my conclusions?
He, Warden, had never seen her drink so much. Usually she drank very little if any. She did not even like for him to drink much. This time she ended up by getting as drunk or drunker as often or oftener than he did, and he resented it. Not only had he needed that whiskey himself, but it frightened him. He did not want a wife who was going to turn into an alcoholic anonymous. He did not want to have to add that guilt onto all of the other guilts. He must have overlooked something. He must have made some mistake.
My conclusions, his mind went on anyway, are that marriage in the United States is based upon the principle of romantic love. Not wholly, of course, but in the majority; you will agree that the majority in the United States accept the principle of romantic love. They accept it so strongly, in fact, that even the minority who marry for other reasons such as money or social position or business or just plain security still strive to give the impression of having married for romantic love. This is, incidentally, perhaps the only country in the world where that is true, even among the most ignorant lower classes of peasantry, if you discount England. Myself, I always discount England. Well, by personal observation and careful experimentation, during these three or four months I had nothing to do, I have finally isolated the virus of the illusion of romantic love. My conclusion, in this paper, is that the epidemic of romantic love which is threatening to decimate the United States is the direct result of a viscid vicious virulent virus, or infection, which, for lack of a better name, I shall call Ego-stimulation; or, naming it after its discoverer, Warden’s Bacil