July 26, 2025 • 24 mins
Discover the untold story of renowned author Jack London, who tragically passed away at just forty years old. In this deeply personal memoir, London shares his life through the lens of his relationship with alcohol, personified as John Barleycorn. Despite the prevailing controversies surrounding his demise, Londons candid exposition of his battles with alcoholism was far ahead of its time, pre-empting modern theories of addiction. With an extraordinary blend of honesty and insight, he unveils his encounters with both the demons and deities of his life, personified by his friend and foe, John Barleycorn. (Summary by Peter Kelleher)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapters thirty three, thirty four, and thirty five of John
barleycorn Or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack Lundon. This is a
LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
(00:20):
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Chapter thirty three. I went to Australia to go into
hospital and get tinkered up, after which I planned to
go on with the voyage, and during the long weeks
(00:42):
I lay in hospital. From the first day, I never
missed alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I
should have it again when I was on my feet.
But when I regained my feat I was not cured
of my major afflixens. Nayman's silvery skin was still mine.
(01:05):
The mysterious sun sickness, which the experts of Australia could
not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still
festered in me and put me on my back in
shivering delirium at the most unexpected moments, compelling me to
(01:25):
cancel a double lecture tour which had been arranged. So
I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate.
The day I came out of hospital, I took up
drinking again. As a matter of course. I drank wine
at meals. I drank cocktails before meals. I drank Scotch
(01:48):
high balls when anybody I chanced to be with was
drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn.
I could take up with him or let go of
him whenever I pleased, just as I had done all
my life. After a time for cooler climate, I went
(02:11):
down to southernmost Tasmania in forty three south and I
found myself in a place where there was nothing to drink.
It didn't mean anything I didn't drink. It was no hardship.
I soaked in the cool air, rode horseback, and did
(02:31):
my thousand words a day, save when the fever shock
came in the morning. And for fear that the idea
may still lurk in some minds that my preceding years
of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I here
point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me,
(02:55):
was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who, in addition,
was in the slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required
several years of temperate climates to cure, and that neither
she nor Nakata drank or ever had drunk. When I
(03:16):
returned to Hobarch Town, where drink was obtainable, I drank
as of old, the same when I arrived back in Australia.
On the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a
tramp steamer commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no
(03:37):
drink along and had no drink for the forty three
days passage. Arrived in Ecuador, squarely under the equatorial sun,
where the humans were dying of yellow fever, smallpox, and
the plague. I promptly drank again every drink of every
(03:58):
sort that had a care it. I caught none of
these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata, who did not drink.
Enamored of the tropics despite the damage done me, I
stopped in various places and was a long while getting
back to the splendid temperate climate of California. I did
(04:23):
my thousand words a day, traveling or stopping over. Suffered
my last faint fever shock, saw my silvery skin vanish,
and my sun torn tissues healthily knit again, and drank
as a broad shouldered, chesty man made drink Chapter thirty four.
(04:49):
Back on the ranch in the Valley of the Moon,
I resumed my steady drinking. My program was no drink
in the morning. First drink time came with the completion
of my thousand words. Then between that and the midday
meal were drinks numerous enough to develop a pleasant jingle. Again,
(05:14):
in the hour preceding the evening meal, I developed another
pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for the simple
reason that I never was drunk, but I did get
a jingle twice each day. And the amount of alcohol
I consumed every day, if loosed in the system of
(05:37):
one unaccustomed to drink, would have put such a one
on his back and out. It was the old proposition.
The more I drank, the more I was compelled to
drink in order to get an effect. The time came
when cocktails were inadequate, I had neither the time in
(06:00):
which to drink them, nor the space to accommodate them.
Whiskey had a more powerful jolt. It gave quicker action
with less quantity. Bourbon or rye or cunningly aged blends
constituted the pre mid day drinking. In the afternoon it
(06:22):
was scotch and soda. My sleep, always excellent, now became
not quite so excellent. I had been accustomed to read
myself back asleep when I chanced to awake, but now
this began to fail me. When I had read two
(06:42):
or three of the small hours away and was as
wide awake as ever, I found that a drink furnished
the soporific effect. Sometimes two or three drinks were required.
So short a period of sleep then intervened before early
(07:02):
morning rising that my system did not have time to
work off the alcohol. As a result, I awoke with
mouth parched and dry, with a slight heaviness of head,
and with a mild nervous palpitation in the stomach. In fact,
I did not feel good. I was suffering from the
(07:26):
morning sickness of the steady heavy drinker. What I needed
was a pick me up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn
once he has broken down a man's defenses. So it
was a drink before breakfast to put me right for breakfast.
(07:48):
The old poison of the snake that has bitten one.
Another custom began at this time was that of the
picture of water by the bedside. To furnish relief to
my mind, I scorched and sizzling membranes. I achieved a
condition in which my body was never free from alcohol,
(08:10):
Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol.
If I traveled out of the way places I declined
to run the risk of finding them dry. I took
a court or several courts along in my grip. In
the past I had been amazed by other men guilty
(08:31):
of this practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And
when I got out with the fellows, I cast all
rules by the board. I drank when they drank what
they drank, and in the same way as they drank.
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me.
(08:57):
The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer.
There was no time in all my waking time that
I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the
completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink
when only five hundred words were written. It was not
(09:21):
long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words
with a drink. The gravity of this I realized too well.
I made new rules. Resolutely, I would refrain from drinking
until my work was done. But a new and most
(09:44):
diabolical complication arose. The work refused to be done without drinking.
It just couldn't be done. I had to drink in
order to do it. I was beginning to fight now.
I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me.
(10:09):
I would sit at my desk and dally with pad
and pen, but words refused to flow. My brain could
not think the proper thoughts because continually it was obsessed
with the one thought that across the room, in the
(10:30):
liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When in despair, I took
my drink at once, my brain loosened up and began
to roll off the thousand words. In my townhouse in Oakland,
(10:50):
I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully refused to
purchase more. It was no use, because, unfortunately, there remained
in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer.
In Vain. I tried to write, Now, beer is a
(11:13):
poor substitute for strong waters. Besides, I didn't like beer.
Yet all I could think of was that beer so
singularly accessible in the bottom of the cabinet. Not until
I had drunk a pint of it did the words
(11:33):
begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off
to the tune of numerous pints. The worst of it
was that the beer caused me severe heartburn, But despite
the discomfort, I soon finished off the case. The liquor
(11:54):
cabinet was now bear I did not replenish it heroic perseverance.
I finally forced myself to write the daily thousand words
without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all the time
I wrote, I was keenly aware of the craving for
(12:16):
a drink, And as soon as the morning's work was done,
I was out of the house and away downtown to
get my first drink. Merciful goodness, if John Barleycorn could
get such sway over me, a non alcoholic, what must
(12:38):
be the sufferings of the true alcoholic, battling against the
organic demons of his chemistry, while those closest to him sympathize, little,
understand less, and despise and deride him Chapter thirty five.
(13:01):
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. The old long sickness, which
had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudessed. The old ghosts
(13:24):
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 and normal logic, But
now they were raised by the white logic of John Barleycorn.
(13:46):
And John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his raising.
For this sickness of pessimism caused by drink, one must
drink further. In quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn
promises but never delivers. How to describe this white logic
(14:11):
to those who have never experienced it, It is perhaps
better first to state how impossible such a description is.
Take Hasheish Land, for instance, the land of enormous extensions
of time and space. In past years I have made
(14:34):
two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures there
are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I
have tried, vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny
particular phase to persons who have not traveled there. I
(14:59):
use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries
to time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can
obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the
notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano.
(15:22):
I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of
hashish Land. And at the end I have told them nothing.
And when I cannot tell them this one thing, of
all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know,
I have failed to give them the slightest concept of
(15:46):
hashish Land. But let me talk with some other traveler
in that weird region. And at once am I understood
a phrase. A word conveys instantly to his mind what
hours of words and phrases could not convey to the
(16:06):
mind of the non traveler. So it is with John
Barleycorn's realm, where the white logic reigns to those untraveled. There,
the traveler's account must always seem unintelligible and fantastic. At
the best, I may only beg of the untraveled ones
(16:31):
to strive 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
seem to be various orders of truth in this world.
(16:53):
Some sorts of truth are truer than others. Some sorts
of truth are lies. And these sorts are the very
ones that have the greatest use value of life that
desires to realize and live at once, O untraveled reader,
you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I
(17:17):
am trying to describe to you in the language of
John Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe,
all of whose members resolutely shun the roads that lead
to death and tread only the roads that lead to life.
For there are roads and roads, and of truth, there
(17:41):
are orders and orders. But have patience, at least through
what seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may perchance
glimpse faint far vistas of other lands and tribepes. Alcohol
(18:01):
tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is
normal is healthful, What is healthful tends towards life. Normal
truth is a different order, and a lesser order of truth.
Take a dray horse through all the vicissitudes of its
(18:23):
life from first to last, somehow, in unguessably dim ways.
It must believe that life is good, that the drudgery
in harness is good, That death, no matter how blind
instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant. That life is beneficent
(18:47):
and worthwhile, that in the end, with fading life, it
will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond
its sprained and spavined best. That old age even is decent, dignified,
and valuable, though old age means a ribby scarecrow in
(19:11):
a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling
dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to the end,
the end, the apportionment of its parts, of its subtle flesh,
its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and
(19:35):
all the sensateness that informed it to the chicken farm,
the hide house, the glue rendering works, and the bone
meal fertilizer factory, to the last stumble of its stumbling end.
This dray horse must abide by the mandates of the
(19:56):
lesser truth, that is the truth of life, and then
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 no matter
(20:18):
what the price. The game of life is good, though
all of life 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, but for
the live things in it, if they for a little space,
(20:42):
will endure ere they pass. This order of truth, no
matter how erroneous it may be, is the sane and
normal order of truth, the rational order of truth that
life must believe in order to live. To man alone
(21:03):
among the animals, has been given the awful privilege of reason.
Man with his brain can penetrate the intoxicating show of
things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward
him and his dreams. He can do this, but it
(21:27):
is not well for him to do it, to live
and live abundantly, to sting with life, to be alive,
which is to be what he is. It is good
that man be life blinded and sense struck. What is
(21:48):
good is true, and this is the order of truth.
Lesser though it be that man must know and guide
his actions by whither unswerving certitude that it is absolute truth,
and that in the universe no other order of truth
(22:09):
can obtain. It is good that man should accept at
face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh,
and through the fogs of sentiency, pursue the lures and
lies of passion. It is good that he shall see
(22:31):
neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by his lusts
and rapacities. And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed
the other and truer order of truth and recoiled from it.
Countless men have passed through the long sickness and lived
(22:53):
to tell of it, and deliberately to forget it. To
the end of their days they lived. They realize life,
for life is what they were. They did right. And
now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon
(23:16):
the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire
to live. John Barleycorn sends his white logic, the argent
messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel
and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero,
(23:43):
dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.
John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live.
He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to miss the
(24:03):
paradox of being until his victim cries out, as in
the city of dreadful Night, our LIFs a cheat, our
death a black abyss, and the feet of the victim
of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death.
(24:29):
End of Chapter thirty five.
Chapters thirty three, thirty four, and thirty five of John
barleycorn Or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack Lundon. This is a
LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
(00:20):
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Chapter thirty three. I went to Australia to go into
hospital and get tinkered up, after which I planned to
go on with the voyage, and during the long weeks
(00:42):
I lay in hospital. From the first day, I never
missed alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I
should have it again when I was on my feet.
But when I regained my feat I was not cured
of my major afflixens. Nayman's silvery skin was still mine.
(01:05):
The mysterious sun sickness, which the experts of Australia could
not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still
festered in me and put me on my back in
shivering delirium at the most unexpected moments, compelling me to
(01:25):
cancel a double lecture tour which had been arranged. So
I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate.
The day I came out of hospital, I took up
drinking again. As a matter of course. I drank wine
at meals. I drank cocktails before meals. I drank Scotch
(01:48):
high balls when anybody I chanced to be with was
drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn.
I could take up with him or let go of
him whenever I pleased, just as I had done all
my life. After a time for cooler climate, I went
(02:11):
down to southernmost Tasmania in forty three south and I
found myself in a place where there was nothing to drink.
It didn't mean anything I didn't drink. It was no hardship.
I soaked in the cool air, rode horseback, and did
(02:31):
my thousand words a day, save when the fever shock
came in the morning. And for fear that the idea
may still lurk in some minds that my preceding years
of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I here
point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me,
(02:55):
was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who, in addition,
was in the slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required
several years of temperate climates to cure, and that neither
she nor Nakata drank or ever had drunk. When I
(03:16):
returned to Hobarch Town, where drink was obtainable, I drank
as of old, the same when I arrived back in Australia.
On the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a
tramp steamer commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no
(03:37):
drink along and had no drink for the forty three
days passage. Arrived in Ecuador, squarely under the equatorial sun,
where the humans were dying of yellow fever, smallpox, and
the plague. I promptly drank again every drink of every
(03:58):
sort that had a care it. I caught none of
these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata, who did not drink.
Enamored of the tropics despite the damage done me, I
stopped in various places and was a long while getting
back to the splendid temperate climate of California. I did
(04:23):
my thousand words a day, traveling or stopping over. Suffered
my last faint fever shock, saw my silvery skin vanish,
and my sun torn tissues healthily knit again, and drank
as a broad shouldered, chesty man made drink Chapter thirty four.
(04:49):
Back on the ranch in the Valley of the Moon,
I resumed my steady drinking. My program was no drink
in the morning. First drink time came with the completion
of my thousand words. Then between that and the midday
meal were drinks numerous enough to develop a pleasant jingle. Again,
(05:14):
in the hour preceding the evening meal, I developed another
pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for the simple
reason that I never was drunk, but I did get
a jingle twice each day. And the amount of alcohol
I consumed every day, if loosed in the system of
(05:37):
one unaccustomed to drink, would have put such a one
on his back and out. It was the old proposition.
The more I drank, the more I was compelled to
drink in order to get an effect. The time came
when cocktails were inadequate, I had neither the time in
(06:00):
which to drink them, nor the space to accommodate them.
Whiskey had a more powerful jolt. It gave quicker action
with less quantity. Bourbon or rye or cunningly aged blends
constituted the pre mid day drinking. In the afternoon it
(06:22):
was scotch and soda. My sleep, always excellent, now became
not quite so excellent. I had been accustomed to read
myself back asleep when I chanced to awake, but now
this began to fail me. When I had read two
(06:42):
or three of the small hours away and was as
wide awake as ever, I found that a drink furnished
the soporific effect. Sometimes two or three drinks were required.
So short a period of sleep then intervened before early
(07:02):
morning rising that my system did not have time to
work off the alcohol. As a result, I awoke with
mouth parched and dry, with a slight heaviness of head,
and with a mild nervous palpitation in the stomach. In fact,
I did not feel good. I was suffering from the
(07:26):
morning sickness of the steady heavy drinker. What I needed
was a pick me up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn
once he has broken down a man's defenses. So it
was a drink before breakfast to put me right for breakfast.
(07:48):
The old poison of the snake that has bitten one.
Another custom began at this time was that of the
picture of water by the bedside. To furnish relief to
my mind, I scorched and sizzling membranes. I achieved a
condition in which my body was never free from alcohol,
(08:10):
Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol.
If I traveled out of the way places I declined
to run the risk of finding them dry. I took
a court or several courts along in my grip. In
the past I had been amazed by other men guilty
(08:31):
of this practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And
when I got out with the fellows, I cast all
rules by the board. I drank when they drank what
they drank, and in the same way as they drank.
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me.
(08:57):
The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer.
There was no time in all my waking time that
I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the
completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink
when only five hundred words were written. It was not
(09:21):
long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words
with a drink. The gravity of this I realized too well.
I made new rules. Resolutely, I would refrain from drinking
until my work was done. But a new and most
(09:44):
diabolical complication arose. The work refused to be done without drinking.
It just couldn't be done. I had to drink in
order to do it. I was beginning to fight now.
I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me.
(10:09):
I would sit at my desk and dally with pad
and pen, but words refused to flow. My brain could
not think the proper thoughts because continually it was obsessed
with the one thought that across the room, in the
(10:30):
liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When in despair, I took
my drink at once, my brain loosened up and began
to roll off the thousand words. In my townhouse in Oakland,
(10:50):
I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully refused to
purchase more. It was no use, because, unfortunately, there remained
in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer.
In Vain. I tried to write, Now, beer is a
(11:13):
poor substitute for strong waters. Besides, I didn't like beer.
Yet all I could think of was that beer so
singularly accessible in the bottom of the cabinet. Not until
I had drunk a pint of it did the words
(11:33):
begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off
to the tune of numerous pints. The worst of it
was that the beer caused me severe heartburn, But despite
the discomfort, I soon finished off the case. The liquor
(11:54):
cabinet was now bear I did not replenish it heroic perseverance.
I finally forced myself to write the daily thousand words
without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all the time
I wrote, I was keenly aware of the craving for
(12:16):
a drink, And as soon as the morning's work was done,
I was out of the house and away downtown to
get my first drink. Merciful goodness, if John Barleycorn could
get such sway over me, a non alcoholic, what must
(12:38):
be the sufferings of the true alcoholic, battling against the
organic demons of his chemistry, while those closest to him sympathize, little,
understand less, and despise and deride him Chapter thirty five.
(13:01):
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. The old long sickness, which
had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudessed. The old ghosts
(13:24):
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 and normal logic, But
now they were raised by the white logic of John Barleycorn.
(13:46):
And John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his raising.
For this sickness of pessimism caused by drink, one must
drink further. In quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn
promises but never delivers. How to describe this white logic
(14:11):
to those who have never experienced it, It is perhaps
better first to state how impossible such a description is.
Take Hasheish Land, for instance, the land of enormous extensions
of time and space. In past years I have made
(14:34):
two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures there
are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I
have tried, vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny
particular phase to persons who have not traveled there. I
(14:59):
use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries
to time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can
obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the
notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano.
(15:22):
I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of
hashish Land. And at the end I have told them nothing.
And when I cannot tell them this one thing, of
all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know,
I have failed to give them the slightest concept of
(15:46):
hashish Land. But let me talk with some other traveler
in that weird region. And at once am I understood
a phrase. A word conveys instantly to his mind what
hours of words and phrases could not convey to the
(16:06):
mind of the non traveler. So it is with John
Barleycorn's realm, where the white logic reigns to those untraveled. There,
the traveler's account must always seem unintelligible and fantastic. At
the best, I may only beg of the untraveled ones
(16:31):
to strive 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
seem to be various orders of truth in this world.
(16:53):
Some sorts of truth are truer than others. Some sorts
of truth are lies. And these sorts are the very
ones that have the greatest use value of life that
desires to realize and live at once, O untraveled reader,
you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I
(17:17):
am trying to describe to you in the language of
John Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe,
all of whose members resolutely shun the roads that lead
to death and tread only the roads that lead to life.
For there are roads and roads, and of truth, there
(17:41):
are orders and orders. But have patience, at least through
what seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may perchance
glimpse faint far vistas of other lands and tribepes. Alcohol
(18:01):
tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is
normal is healthful, What is healthful tends towards life. Normal
truth is a different order, and a lesser order of truth.
Take a dray horse through all the vicissitudes of its
(18:23):
life from first to last, somehow, in unguessably dim ways.
It must believe that life is good, that the drudgery
in harness is good, That death, no matter how blind
instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant. That life is beneficent
(18:47):
and worthwhile, that in the end, with fading life, it
will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond
its sprained and spavined best. That old age even is decent, dignified,
and valuable, though old age means a ribby scarecrow in
(19:11):
a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling
dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to the end,
the end, the apportionment of its parts, of its subtle flesh,
its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and
(19:35):
all the sensateness that informed it to the chicken farm,
the hide house, the glue rendering works, and the bone
meal fertilizer factory, to the last stumble of its stumbling end.
This dray horse must abide by the mandates of the
(19:56):
lesser truth, that is the truth of life, and then
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 no matter
(20:18):
what the price. The game of life is good, though
all of life 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, but for
the live things in it, if they for a little space,
(20:42):
will endure ere they pass. This order of truth, no
matter how erroneous it may be, is the sane and
normal order of truth, the rational order of truth that
life must believe in order to live. To man alone
(21:03):
among the animals, has been given the awful privilege of reason.
Man with his brain can penetrate the intoxicating show of
things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward
him and his dreams. He can do this, but it
(21:27):
is not well for him to do it, to live
and live abundantly, to sting with life, to be alive,
which is to be what he is. It is good
that man be life blinded and sense struck. What is
(21:48):
good is true, and this is the order of truth.
Lesser though it be that man must know and guide
his actions by whither unswerving certitude that it is absolute truth,
and that in the universe no other order of truth
(22:09):
can obtain. It is good that man should accept at
face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh,
and through the fogs of sentiency, pursue the lures and
lies of passion. It is good that he shall see
(22:31):
neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by his lusts
and rapacities. And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed
the other and truer order of truth and recoiled from it.
Countless men have passed through the long sickness and lived
(22:53):
to tell of it, and deliberately to forget it. To
the end of their days they lived. They realize life,
for life is what they were. They did right. And
now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon
(23:16):
the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire
to live. John Barleycorn sends his white logic, the argent
messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel
and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero,
(23:43):
dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.
John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live.
He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to miss the
(24:03):
paradox of being until his victim cries out, as in
the city of dreadful Night, our LIFs a cheat, our
death a black abyss, and the feet of the victim
of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death.
(24:29):
End of Chapter thirty five.
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