文摘——The Mimic Man

1
We lack order. Above all, we lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the accclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost. Politics for us are a do-or-die, once-for-all charge. Once we are committed we fight more than political battles; we often fight quite literally for our lives. Or transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us.

2
The pacific society has its cruelties. Once a man is stripped of his dignities he is required, not to die or to run away, but to find his level.

3
Most of us were too timid to make a fortune, or too ignorant; we measured both our opportunities and our needs by the dreams of our previous nonentity.

4
They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of.

5
I no longer wish to share distress; I do not have the equipment.

6
Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators. Haveing no gifts to offer, they seldom know what they seek. They might say they seek power. But their definition of power is vague and unreliable.

7
Is it the power to bully or humiliate or take revenge? But this is the briefest sort of power; it goes as quickly as it comes; and the true politician is by his nature a man who wishes to play the game all his life. The politician is more than a man with a cause, even when this cause is no more than self-advancement. He is driven by some little hurt, some little incompleteness. He is seeking to exercise some skill he is not aware until he begins to exercise it. How offen we find those who after years of struggle and manipulation come close to the position they crave, sometimes indeed achieving it, and then are failures. They do not deserve pity, for among the aspirants to power they are complete men; it will be found that they have sought and achieved fulfillment elsewhere; it takes a world war to rescue a Churchill from political failure. Whereas the true politician finds his skill and his completeness only in success. His gifts suddenly come to him. He who in other days was mean, intemperate and infirm now reveals unsuspected qualities of generosity, moderation and swift brutality. Power alone proves the politician; it is ingenuous to express surprise at an unexpected failure or an unexpected flowering.

8
But more often we see the true politician in decay. The gifts, unexpressed, the skills, undiscovered, turn sour within him; and he who began as wise and generous and fighting for the good cause turns out to be weak and vacillating. He abandons his principles; with every defeat he becomes more desperate; he loses his sense of timing, changing too early or too late; he even loses a sense of dignity. He turns to drink or to fine food or to women coarse or superfine; he becomes a buffoon, contemptible even to himself, except in the still hours of the late evening, when he has no audience save himself and his wife who, though embittered, remains loyal because she alone knows the true man. And through everything he never gives up. Here is your true politician, the man with the nebulous skill. Offer him power. It will revive him; it will restore the man he once was.

9
Be kind to those you meet on the way up, runs the saying; for they are the very people you are going to meet on the way down. Frivolous; and very safe; and very smug. The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.

10
And the day would come; and wee would create, out of the drabness that surrounded us both, an occasion. It was the perfect basis for a relationship.

11
This return so soon to a landscape which I thought I had put out of my life for good was a failure and a humiliation. Yet this, together with all my unease, I buried away. I am no great believer in justice, but I think there is a moral balance in all human events; if only we look down deeply enough, we can spot the beginning of the misfortunes that eventually overtake us in just such a small suppression of the truth, in just such a tiny corruption.