I come, I said, to be useful and to entertain. What else can one do? Between the acts something must be done to occupy our minds or we become too aware of our great emptiness. It is true, we might converse with one another. But then we would learn again how little all of us have to say to each other. Love is not American. Neither is conversation, but that is not exactly what I mean.
One ought to be amusing, but unfortunately I know very few witty sayings, entertaining stories. I find that my idea of the comical is not, as they say, objective. I have tried for some time to invent a good story for this occasion, but the best I could do is this new wrinkle, entitled “Turning the Tables”: ABC says to DEF: “Who was that lady I saw you with last night? Some fun, hey, boy!” DEF, offended by the lightness with which his passion is regarded, replies: “That was no lady, that was your wife.” A good story too, at least to me, is Stendhal’s remark on first eating ice cream: “What a pity it is not a sin!” Becoming more serious in order to approach nearer to my true subject, I recall the fact that Fichte drank champagne for the first time when his infant boy said “I” for the first time. Let me continue with two more quotations bearing on this Laocoön-like process and presentation which we are here to see. “I can hire half of the working class to fight the other half.” So said Jay Gould at about the same time that Engels, intimate friend of a member of the audience, was observing with the most perfect justice that the most appalling evil produced by class conflict was its corruption and degradation of the ruling class—barbarism, inexorable cynicism, contempt for all values on the part of those who enjoy the greatest benefits of society. Sophocles observes that man is the most admirable of beings. It is true. The most digusting also, one ought to add. It is dialectical. The possibility of the one means the possibility of the other.