2262) There was probably a touch of psychic hari-kari in every human community. For every community promulgated some sacred mission or other, dedication was the matrix of every group, its psychic glue - and every communal mission was in the end a bit absurd. Why? Well, simply because it demanded of all men within its pale that they order their psychic economies to conform with the group goal, verticalize their horizontal instincts: this was the meaning of the reality principle as superimposed on the pleasure principle. But the reality created and deified by the community, although it undoubtedly paid some emotional dividends to those who kowtowed to it, never turned out a really adequate substitute for the simpler instinctual pleasures sacrificed at its altar: peace, for example, was a hollow gift when purchased at the price of orgasm, or limbs. So even in the most socialized citizen, the most obedient, there was a festering remnant of discontent. Particularly since, when he looked around, he saw other men in other places devoted to goals quite antithetical to his own - and every bit as solemn about it.

Good enough. It followed, then, that the healthiest society was one which allowed its members ample escape valves for the discontents fomented by civilization and its instinct trampling ends: along with the bread of solemnity, plenty of irrelevant circuses in which clowns rode all the sacred cows. Where there were enough such circuses, little ambivalence remained to poison the more devotional activities. But among people who were discontented enough, and were not provided with enough drainage systems for their malaise, every day was something of a circus, ever solemn undertaking poisoned by a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude - they did obeisance to the community's lofty goals but always with a shrug of the shoulders and sardonic shadows playing around the mouth and the tacit suspicion that "Dolce far niente." ["Doing nothing is sweet."]

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2263) [E]very one of the big salvationist movements in history - from the Ten Commandments all the way down to the Mormons' Latter Day Sainthood and Christian Science and Jehovah's Witnesses and Fletcherism and Bolshevik-Leninism and Dianetics and Orgonotics and Santa Monica Vedanta and Mangunga - every one of them might have started out as a great Swiftean joke. That some humorless man got hold of and took literally.

The jokes got wilder and wilder, people laughed less and less.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2264) Thing is, man has always been uneasy with the world as it is - its disarray, its slipshoddiness. Can't stand an indefinite turbulence in his affairs. People are too damned neat to live with the world's litter; maybe it come from too much toilet training. Man isn't the tool maker, the speech maker, the concept maker; pre-eminently he's the system maker, the compulsive bringer of order into primordial messiness.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2265) All along, the philosopher's Holy Grail has been the magical Hyphen, some unified-field theory or another. After the religious short cuts [...] had been tried and failed - the Catholic's hierarchical stepladder to the One, the Protestant's individual pipeline - the philosopher's had a try at patching things up. They were all variations on Descartes, trying to find the missing cosmic link in one pineal gland or another. [...] Often a guy seem to get a hold of some provocative kernel of an idea, some puny lever with which to pry open this or that chunk of reality - but invariably he palmed it off as the Ultimate Lever. Some of these guys, in fact, judging from the grandiosity and fanatical intensity of their writings, were in the strictest sense pathological, determined to find the one key that would open all doors. It never occurred to them that different doors might be fitted with totally different kids of locks. So that anybody rash enough to pose as cosmic locksmith should, in the interest of public safety, himself be locked up. To mix the figure still further, a key which is fobbed off as a cosmic can opener can very easily be turned into a bull whip or truncheon or automatic - or steamroller.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2266) [W]hat distinguishes man from animal? Not hands, not superego, not logic, not the ability to abstract and make instruments, not his myths and dreams and nightmares - the beginnings of all these things are there in higher animals, it's just a matter of man having more of the same. There's only one thing man can do that's beyond all other animals on earth: he can laugh. [...] Correction. Two things distinguish man from the animal. He laughs - uses throat can vocal cords in a most unfunctional way. Also cries - first time in the animal kingdom the tear ducts were ever put to such fantastic unfunctional uses. And performs both unfunctional activities as one function, when he's fully human. Homo Dei, the weepy titterer: laughs til the tears come.

Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2267) Anybody who "paints a picture" of some coming year is kidding - he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then is a rather bilious rib on 1950 - on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.

I am writing about the overtone and undertow of now [i.e. 1950] - in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications. What 1990 will really look like I haven't the slightest idea. Nobody can train his mind to think effectively, without vertigo, in terms of acceleration and accelerated accelerations - and nobody can foretell Clio's pratfalls. On the spurious map of the future presented herein, on the far side of the pinpoint of now, I have to inscribe, as did the medieval cartographers over all the terrifying areas outside their ken: HERE LIVE LIONS. They could, of course, be unicorns, or hippographs, or even giraffes. I don't know if there's going to be a 1990.

Bernard Wolfe
"Author's Notes and Warnings"
Limbo (1952)