Free The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl by Brigid Brophy Page A

round.
    ‘Yes. Did you think only you had them? Waste consists of letting someone’s work – someone’s energy – dribble away into an unproductive dead end. Waste is death. Like you, I’m engaged in a war against death. So: my first principle is that anything that doesn’t contribute to life – to efficiency, to production – must be cut out. My left arm contributes nothing.I’m not merely right-handed; I’m extremely right-handed. With my left hand I can’t so much as turn a doorknob or unzip my trousers. I have to maintain – foodwise, energywise, washing-wise , warmthwise, clothingwise – all this muscle power in my left arm but I can’t apply it.’
    ‘You use your left arm in ways you’re not aware of. To maintain balance, and so on.’
    ‘I’ve come down from the trees. Mobility, for me, is pressing the buttons on the intercom. That’s how I got you to come here. You have to be mobile. I just have to get you to come. And I push the buttons with the fingers of my right hand.’
    ‘The whole idea is monstrous,’ the surgeon said.
    ‘You mean logical.’
    ‘Yes, all right, logical – but totally unreasonable. Such a drastic remedy – merely to save ten pence a day.’
    ‘You have the characteristic mentality of the professional classes’, the businessman said affably. ‘You professional men know about making money. You enjoy making it. You yourself have probably made , in one sense of the word, as much as I have. But when you’ve made it, you can’t think of anything to do with it except spend it. That’s why you’re merely comfortably off, whereas I’m what you call a millionaire.’
    ‘Why do you say what I call a millionaire? Aren’t you a millionaire?’
    ‘Frightened my offer won’t be as much as you’d hoped?’
    ‘I tell you there’s no question—’
    ‘Just my little millionaire’s joke’, the businessman said calmingly . ‘No, when you talk about a millionaire, I feel as you medical practitioners must when a patient says “Doctor, my blood’s over-heated” or “Doctor, I’m having trouble with my nerves”. I can tell that you don’t know what you mean yourself. You’ve no clear picture in your own head whether your millionaire is someone who could raise a million or someone who could realise a million or just someone whose holdings are worth a million on paper so long as he doesn’t try to realise them. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you visualise a millionaire as someone who keeps a million in cash in cardboard boxes under the bed.’
    ‘I don’t profess to be a financier.’
    ‘Yet you think you know you can afford to refuse my offerbefore you’ve even heard it.’
    ‘I know I can live comfortably without your offer.’
    ‘By “comfortably”, you mean having plenty of cash to spend. If I offered you a million – and don’t get excited; I shan’t – you’d ask for it to be delivered in cardboard boxes.’
    ‘Well, if it was tied in some investment and I couldn’t get it out without destroying its value, I wouldn’t get much fun out of it.’
    ‘A millionaire who keeps his million under the bed will never be a multi-millionaire.’
    ‘I don’t want to be a multi-millionaire.’
    ‘You don’t want ! It all turns on what you personally want . You professional classes are so selfish. You think of me as a greedy capitalist. You imagine you’re well to the liberal side of me. And all you want is cash to spend, regardless of what you do to the economy. Just because you work hard at a skilled, socially useful job, you think you’re entitled to a high income – and you believe that income to be your reward. You feel entitled to get fun out of it: by spending it. You take the money out of the economy and drop it through a hole in your pocket and then you righteously say you’re not pathologically greedy. What you do is convert capital into waste matter. When you divert money from its productive function of making money, you kill it. I look