WHAT we moderns carry about with us all the while is an instinctive, dumb, unsatisfied craving for great experience. It gnaws faintly within us like those mild disquietudes of the stomach which seem to be neither quite dyspepsia nor quite health, neither honest appetite nor queasy satiety. It is a chord unstruck, a muscle unexercised, a void darkly throbbing to be filled. Life goes on, a good deal of it interesting, a good deal of it amusing. We have friends, achievements, distractions. But the great note of derring do, the high endurance and all the pomp of conscious fortitude, this plangent note remains unsounded.

And we deprive ourselves of this heroic note by our own agency. Unconsciously pining to burn at the stake, or to oppose a dauntless breast to the rage of some Ivan the Terrible, we end by adding more expensive upholstery to the Rolls-Royce. Finding no Socrates to elicit from our bewildered minds a better conception of our own good and pleasure, we follow comfort to our own insufferable tedium, and wind ourselves more inextricably in the toils of ease.

I discovered this during a recent visit to the dentist. Perhaps, not to slight the man’s due titles and offices, I should call him the oral surgeon. But as a matter of fact his approach was crisply and efficiently taciturn. Oral he may have been, but he was vocal only within the strict limits of a somewhat brassy professional cheerfulness. As I sat waiting in his reception room for the summons to the chair of state within, my viscera began to send up premonitory thrills of expectation. I felt myself begin to curdle gently, to seethe inwardly with slowly increasing heat. Had I been a kettle of water on the stove at that moment, I should have begun to give off a mist of small bubbles and a faint, moist breath, preparatory to the full, jiggling harmonies of boiling.

Now, I felt, life is really going to present me with a major experience. I am about to be deprived of one of my members, an integral part of myself; almost, I might have said, a playmate and companion whom I had knowm since my earliest years. How many a succulent steak we had devoured together about the camp fire! Into how many a frosty apple we had bitten with delicious shooting pains on brisk October mornings! The wrench of parting would be severe. How should I bear up — heroically, with fortitude appropriate to so sharp a loss, or should I squirm and roll a coward’s eye above my white bib? At least I was about to rise to the level of great experience, and no avoiding it. I was about to suffer an act of violence, to be invaded and devastated like a battlefield; and worst of all, I should have to pay the reparations and conduct the reconstruction myself. There would be blood and passion and upheaval. Life would reach a plane of high intensity.

For a time, circumstances contributed to my expectation. It seemed as though existence were really going to be lived for a moment or two on great terms. There was a sense of the sacrosanct about waiting in the austere reception room. It was a vigil during which one prepared for spiritual ordeal by inner purification. One must approach those moments of blessed agony purged and bumbled, with a due sense of sin and of absolution. One after another of the waiting hierophants was haled away to rooms invisible, there to undergo his separate trial, to rise to communion with the one true reality from which we so sedulously insulate ourselves. Each time the summons came I gathered my inner resources and prepared to meet God face to face. The suspense itself attained the sublime. So should a victim feel who waits for the hour of execution to strike. Such postponements and delays are the stuff of high drama and perilous romance.

Even when in my turn I had been admitted to the sanctum where I was to be shrived, the illusion continued to be maintained. Nurses with their record sheets and sacred emblems of office — the unspotted headdress, the starched uniform, and the nun-like pallor of complexion which seems to characterize their profession — bent over me solicitously, seeming to estimate by their gaze just how much this one could stand. More suspense and postponement, mounting to a climax of intensity.

At last the august figure of the oral surgeon himself, steel-eyed, blue-jowled, and built like a football player, a fellow framed for cold-blooded and scientific violence if ever there was one. His swift and phlegmatic preparations, the dull unpleasantness of local anæsthesia, then the strange, insensate sliding of the tooth from its socket. All is over! No more than that! Experience at no higher level than reading of the latest murder trial; sublimity as groundless as terror at a detective play.

Only for an instant the high, clear horns of anguish blew once and were still. Just at the apex of the surgeon’s muscular convulsion, when his short, thick, savage little vise was fumbling for a grip at the base of the jaw, it seemed as though the crown of my head would burst out, and through the hole come flying the surgeon’s hand, his implement gripping with its iron knuckles a raw, white tooth trailing bloody tentacles. But only for an instant; a mere moment’s illusion of what the glorious climax might have been. Then life again, flat, stale, and unprofitable. Not even to myself could I pretend that I had been disabled. Hopefully I took the aspirin tablets proffered by a sympathetic nurse; but I never felt the pain they might have alleviated. Prosaically, I got into my car and drove myself home.

I understand that a new means of rendering childbirth painless has been discovered by a prominent hospital. We might have anticipated this; we might have expected that our entry into the world would be reduced to the level of dentistry. It is the trend of time and circumstance; it is the march of science throttling the rich potentialities of the spirit.

But while man is always imposing some kind of burden on himself, eventually he corrects his excesses, and revolts against his adopted ills. This will prove as true of comfort as of other discomforts. I have heard of South Sea Island tribes whose life is almost fabulously idyllic. Enjoying the simplicity and innocence of Eden, free from devouring monsters, plenteously supplied with food, unacquainted with pestilence or the sword, they, if any of our race, ought to be ignorant of pain. But not content to be happy, they have devised an elaborate ceremonial of tattooing in which, as an initiation into manhood, the youth’s kneecaps, not to mention large areas of his back and thighs, are pricked all over with needles to his no small agony.

Let not the moral escape notice. We may add painless childbirth to painless dentistry, we may multiply devices for comfort and ease; but sooner or later, perhaps when we have been delivered — nay, even precluded — from all involuntary pains, we shall begin imposing on ourselves for pure satisfaction what we have so long and so successfully striven to avoid. We shall benignantly walk barefoot over hot coals, or smile as our friends spray us thick with arrows like Saint Sebastian. The appetite for great experience will somehow be satisfied,

THEODORE MORRISON