Free Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh Page A

necessary evil.”
    “Hold hard there!” I’d say. “If a thing is necessary it can’t be an evil. Evil is unnecessary. That is why it is evil. You observe, you are the sick calf, or horse, or dog, in the laboratory. You feel only your immediate discomfort. You can’t say to yourself, Out of the misery of this base flesh may come a better life and longer hope for something higher up in the scale of evolution.’Which comes first, the man or the horse?”
    Sourbreast always fenced then: “That depends on the man.”
    “Oh, I suppose you would have given preference to a lamb, just because you liked its looks, over a bloody butcher from the Midlands? Yet that butcher begot William Shakespeare. I like your presumption! It’s like a mouse in a cathedral talking architecture.”
    At this point we generally had another drink, and then Sourbreast would say moodily, “You don’t know the meaning of doubt.”
    My reply never failed to irritate him. It was, simply, “That’s right.”
    “Yet anyone can see with half an eye that you’ve suffered like hell.”
    “In point of fact, I haven’t,” I would tell him. “Traumata are a lot of crap. Anybody who says he remembers a physical pain is a liar. You are not constructed to remember pain, or you’d never survive being born. You remember only the fear of being hurt. It is fright, not hurt, that destroys you.”
    So I told him, and so I believed—and so I still believe. Now, in perspective, I see my sentiments just as they were when I lived by instinct. I still believe that sensation is nothing but a spur on the heel of time rowelling the crotch of eternity. Pleasure and pain are neither here nor there; both are evil if you consecrate yourself to one or the other—if you do this, you fall in the scale of things; you sink under the surface of yourself. True happiness is to be found in a species of spiritual osmosis—in absorbing, and at the same time being absorbed. Be calm, hold on to the nucleus of yourself; let yourself be taken in by what surrounds you, and you will get back more than you have given, and so become stronger by having been thus involved. In the meantime, you will have given back some of your strength to its nameless source.
    We are all part of a cosmic give-and-take. There is nothing to be afraid of—not even your own shadow, no matter what danse macabre it makes between guttering candles and the dying embers in the small hours when life runs down.
    As for suffering, I am told that I have had my share of it. But it never took. Experience never taught me to be afraid. It taught me that a pain is a red light, a danger signal, something that warns you to be on your guard against what it presages. But the memory of pain suffered never dulled my desire to find out what lay beyond the pain, behind the red light. Why, good God, if there were any such thing as true remembrance of physical pain, there would be the end of adventure and high endeavor—which would be a great pity. Ninety-five per cent of the tales people tell about their sufferings are a kind of emotional sales talk. Take child-birth, for example, which is the commonest pain in the world and, while it lasts, one of the most acute: every woman talks about it but not one, not a single one, truly remembers it. Pain brings its own anodyne. One deep sleep, and all is forgiven. What they remember about it is the anticipation of it.
    Fear is a kind of hate; they both smell alike. I should not be surprised if it turned out that many of the early Christian martyrs got no more than they asked for—hating and forgiving, and fearing and hoping all in quick succession. Whereas Daniel came alive out of the den of lions simply because he couldn’t be bothered with them. By the same token, if you like, God destroys those who fear Him as surely as life destroys those who fear to live. Superficial observers believe that it is on account of my formidable appearance that I can walk unharmed, well dressed and