Read Online The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg - Free Book Online Page B

intelligent man’s task to create an atmosphere in which surrender to the implausible is possible. A closed mind is a dead mind.” He was warming up, now. Fervor taking hold of him. The Billy Graham of the Stoned Age. “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever
they’ve
rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living. And then we can live forever. Or so close to forever as doesn’t make any difference.”
    Timothy said, “And you want us to believe that the Book of Skulls shows the way, huh?”
    “It’s a possibility. It gives us a finite chance to enter the infinite. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that worth trying? Where did sneering get us? Where did doubt get us? Where did skepticism get us? Can’t we
try
? Can’t we
look
?” Eli had found his faith again. He was shouting, sweating, standing up stark naked and waving his arms around. His whole body was on fire. He was actually beautiful, just for that moment. Eli, beautiful!
    I said, “I’m into this all the way, and at the same time I don’t buy it for half an inch. Do you follow me? I dig the dialectic of the myth. Its implausibility batters against my skepticism and drives me onward. Tensions and contradictions are my fuel.”
    Timothy, devil’s advocate, shook his head—a heavy taurine gesture, his big beefy frame moving like a slow pendulum. “Come on, man. What do you
really
believe? The Skulls, yes or no, salvation or crap, fact or fantasy. Which?”
    “Both,” I said.
    “Both? You can’t have it both.”
    “Yes I can!” I cried. “Both! Both! Yes and no! Can you follow me to where I live, Timothy? In the place where the tension’s greatest, where the yes is drawn tight against the no. Where you simultaneously reject the existence of the inexplicable and accept the existence of the inexplicable. Life eternal! That’s crap, isn’t it, a load of wishful thinking, the old hogwash dream? And yet it’s real, too. We
can
live a thousand years, if we want to. But it’s impossible. I affirm. I deny. I applaud. I jeer.”
    “You don’t make sense,” Timothy grumbled.
    “You make too much sense. I shit on your sense! Eli’s right: we need mystery, we need unreason, we need the unknown, we need the impossible. A whole generation’s been teaching itself to believe the unbelievable, Timothy. And there you stand with your crew cut on, saying it doesn’t make sense.”
    Timothy shrugged. “Right. What do you want from me? I’m just a dumb jock.”
    “That’s your pose,” Eli said. “Your persona, your mask. Big dumb jock. It insulates you. It spares you from having to make any commitment whatsoever, emotional, political, ideological,