Flight From Reality

IT all began one night when I could n’t sleep. I was visiting at that time, so I turned over, switched on the light, and picked up the only book on the bedside table — a little blue volume left there, no doubt, because its binding matched the bedspread. It proved to be a treatise on popular psychology, and if I had known what that volume was to do to me during the next six months I would have hurled it through the window, turned out the light, and chewed the pillows until daybreak.

As it was, however, I found the work quite entertaining, for a book on popular psychology is like a book on popular medicine. You recognize yourself in all the case histories — which makes you feel important. You see that most of the symptoms are your symptoms, but this does not upset you particularly because, all through these books, there is an air of promise, a strong note of approaching revelation. You feel that presently you will turn a page and suddenly find out what has always been the matter with you. To correct it will be but the work of a minute and henceforth you will face the world strong and vigorous, a new man or woman.

In this pleasant spirit I fell asleep, and when I took my train the next morning the book was under my arm, a gift from my hostess, who apparently had not known that she had it in the house. A long train journey is an ideal setting for meditative philosophy and when I reached home the author and I had exactly agreed on the diagnosis of my particular case. I was, I realized, a fugitive from reality. I was one of those pathological misfits who secretly feel themselves unable to cope with the problems of modern existence and so build up a dream world of their own. Everything in my life pointed directly toward this conclusion. From boyhood I had been an mnivorous reader and about half my waking hours were spent among books. I had always disliked crowds, avoided large cities, was bored by politics, and was somewhat cynical about organized activities of any sort. I was not particularly interested in the movies and, unlike most of my friends and relations, found it difficult to chat in the evening with the radio going full blast.

I had, perhaps, regarded some of these traits as unsocial, but not as major crimes. Now I saw that I was nothing more or less than one of life’s deserters and resolved to cut to the very roots of my mental ill. My first evening at home I went to my study and surveyed it with contempt. From behind their glass doors Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Hazlitt, and Lord Frederick Hamilton looked at me expectantly, but I turned the key in their faces and stalked from the room. ‘Come on,’ I said to my wife, ‘let’s go see Myrna Loy.’

The following day I joined the Rotary Club and subscribed to Time. For several weeks I read three daily papers and left the radio on all the while. I learned to play auction, ran for towm councilor, and bought a fifth interest in a local garage. But curiously I did n’t get any better. In fact, even my family observed that I was distinctly worse, for whereas before I had been merely a sort of harmless recluse, now I had become an active grouch.

But talk about flying from reality! The deeper I went into modern psychology the more clear it became that there had never been any reality anyway, from which I could fly. Everything about me, I discovered, was only a mask or a foil, a disguise or a compensation for something else. If I spanked the children for being impudent to their mother, I learned that I had not really done it because of their impudence, but because I was, secretly, too big a sissy to beat up anyone else. If, in remorse, I got out the car and took the whole family to the circus, it was not because I cared anything for the children, but because spreading largesse in public compensated me for not being master in my own house. When I won the Class B tournament on the golf links it was not, apparently, a proof that I was a good golfer, but that I was a poor golfer and had had to win in order to fool myself.

Just what would have happened in the end I cannot imagine if there had not occurred a most curious incident. One late afternoon I was walking down a woodland path when I rounded a bend and saw a funny little man who was trying to light a big brier pipe. I stopped and laughed, for I suddenly realized that here was a human being who was worse off than I was. I was now so soaked in psychological lore that I could recognize all the indications at sight and the man before me had every known symptom of a distorted personality.

To begin with, he was a tiny little fellow with skinny legs and a big Adam’s apple, but he was dressed like a bargain basement ’s idea of the great outdoor man — khaki riding breeches, puttees with low shoes, a blue polo shirt, and a huge checked golf cap. It was an obvious case of thwarted masculinity.

‘Do you happen to have a match?’ asked the stranger, as I approached. ‘I seem to have used up all mine.’

He had indeed, for the simple reason that his pipe was a new one and he had packed it so tightly that he could n’t have lighted it with a blowtorch. I held out a box of safety matches, but as he reached for it his unbuttoned shirt gaped almost to his waist, disclosing a concave chest as white as a snow bank. The little man saw my expression and blushed.

‘You must excuse my dishabille,’ he explained, ‘but to tell the truth I am a great believer in the potency of sunlight.’

Again I grinned inwardly — a covert nudist, unadmitted sex urge, also gullible follower of every new fad.

Nevertheless I could n’t help liking the little fellow. He was really so helpless and so gentle. I suggested that he run a knife blade down the bowl of his pipe. He did so and it lighted perfectly. He looked at me with eyes of admiration and a strange thing began to happen. As in the climax of a fever I suddenly felt my humility complex leaving me and a superiority complex taking its place. I suggested that we walk on together and the little man agreed, trotting along by my side.

‘You are,’ he suggested, ‘a native here?’

‘Oh yes,’ I replied, with the grandeur of a regular resident toward all trippers and transients. ‘Lived here all my life.’

‘It must be wonderful,’ sighed the stranger. ‘A life like this is so real!’

Forthwith he began to question me wistfully and I told him everything that he wanted to know. I told him the difference between birches and poplars and between pheasants and grouse. I told him where to get tobacco that would n’t become soggy in the summertime and that if he would wear high shoes with his puttees the latter would n’t make his ankles sore. I told him that all real woodsmen wore woolen underwear and lived to be ninety and that only tenderfeet went in for this fresh-air fudge. I think that eventually I would have told him that I was Jack Dempsey or Tarzan if we had not presently reached my own gate. Here we paused and I gave my name, but as I waited for the return of the courtesy the stranger became suddenly shy.

‘So that’s it,’ I said to myself. ‘Trying to hide something. I’ll bet he’s a parson.’

But no. The little fellow gulped and came out with it. ‘ I ’m afraid,’ he explained, ‘that when I tell you who I am it will seem pretty piffling to a man of your sort. To tell the truth, I’m a psychologist.’

I don’t know yet just how I ended that interview or whether I ended it at all. All that I remember is that suddenly I found myself in my own study. In my hand was a little blue book. Out behind the barn I knew that a slow, steady fire was burning in the incinerator. And yet —?

Then all at once I had a big idea. I saw the real diagnosis of my special ailment. Chuckling happily, I unlocked my bookcases and placed the little blue volume on one of my choicest shelves — between Gibbon and Hazlitt and just below Lord Frederick Hamilton. There it remains to this day, and from time to time I still take it down —when I am tired of the plain facts of life and wish to escape from reality.