ON STANDING UP
Mayer, Milton
On Standing Up By MILTON MAYER 1HAVE BEEN, as is both my wont and my want, riding the cars between Chicago and the metropolis of Topeka, Kansas. You may tell me that you are dying to hear about...
...I can't keep them both...
...None of them ever rode the cars before, and none of them, when this great crusade is over, will ever ride again...
...The pain of standing today is pleasure indeed compared to the agony of standing tomorrow...
...I must set the example, while I am young, of surrendering my seat so that some fool like me will give me his when I am old...
...Mayer In The Washstand Well, sir, I got on the train for Topeka the other morning and tore straight for the gent's room...
...The passengers, besides the usual elite, who always ride around in a futile effort to escape from the monotony of being the elite, include millions and millions of soldiers and sailors, their wives and sweethearts, and their cousins and their sisters and their aunts...
...The moans of the elderly ladies were in my ears, in my eyes, in my nostrils, in my teeth...
...Pain and pleasure were, we knew now, the only criteria of "good" and "bad," and Socrates, and even -Mill and Bentham, were stooges of the kings and the priests when they admitted the primacy of pain and pleasure but tried to demonstrate that there was, in man, a peculiar sense of pain and pleasure, transcending animality and amounting, in fact, to morality...
...A Philosophical Battle I had paid my passage and had fought fair and free, in the American Way, for my seat, and I did not want to stand up all the way to Chicago...
...I thought I had found, in the philosophy courses in college, a rationale for ignoring the moans and groans of elderly ladies...
...As the train lurched out of K. C, three days late and with the conductor beating off people who were hanging on to the steps, all the people in the aisles fell over and I had the horrible sense that among the moans and groans of the fallen the dominant note came from aged ladies...
...You may tell me that you are dying to hear about Topeka, Kansas, but I am dying to tell you about my ride on the cars, and, as I am doing the talking here, I will do so...
...But Jesus, on the occasion in point, had also said, "Follow me," and I had nowhere to go that would justify a disciple's leaving his dying father, or, for that matter, his elderly mother...
...The professors were right, and Socrates and Jefferson were simians...
...And then, there in the suffocating darkness, my being was bathed in the light of revelation...
...I opened my Bible and got even less comfort out of it...
...Morality was only superstition, the vestiges of the terror that sustained the kings and priests of superstitious times...
...But I could not keep my attention on the book...
...Let the old ladies," I said, "bury the old ladies...
...But the moans of the elderly ladies filled my feelings, my pockets, the cracks between my toes, and, be it said, my soul...
...When the conductor came around he just shoved his ticket out under the door...
...The possible future pain lay in everybody's hanging on to his seat and my being an old lady myself some day...
...Stay home, friends, stay home...
...You ain't heard nuthing...
...sitting was pleasant, and here I was, knowing that man never chooses but only thinks he chooses, and I had responded to blind animal force and "freely chosen" pain instead of pleasure...
...I continued to shave until the train was well under way, and then I rolled up my coat for a seat and rode to Topeka in the washstand...
...I had lost my worldly good the form of a seat and my soul's substance in form of the pleasure-pain principle...
...I had taken an overcoat along, foreseeing the possibility of reaching the gent's room too late, and I proceeded to the smoking compartment, stripped to the waist, and at once began to shave...
...The philosophy of pain and pleasure was saved, and, with it, I was saved from morality, religion, superstition, kings, priests, Socrates, Jefferson, Bentham, Mill, and Darwin...
...The train banked smack into Marceline, Mo., and another chorus of moans and groans arose from the pile of old lad.ies in the aisle...
...Jim Hill did not shed his blood, sweat, and tears so that the likes of them might ride on the cushions...
...I got up...
...I lay in the aisle, with old ladies under and on top of me, and the anguish, physical and mental, was intolerable...
...More power to them, say I; poor devils all, may they ride the railroads until the railroads, already busted by the dividends paid to the widows and orphans of Commodore Vanderbilt, break down...
...You see what riding the cars between Chicago and Topeka did to me...
...We, in our time, were free at last...
...Stay Home, Friends Darkness fell, as it sometimes does in the darkest moments of a man's life, and now the moans and groans, my own included, were invisible...
...Coming back was something else again, for the washstands were all besitzed by people who had boarded the train west of Topeka...
...I buried my head deeper in Joe Miller's Joke Book and tried to look as if I were unaware that the aisle was piled high with elderly ladies...
...I turned to the Gospel according to Matthew and tried to take comfort from Jesus' dictum, "Let the dead bury the dead...
...The streamliners were not built for them, for they are, in time of bright and happy peace, what Adam Smith called the laboring poor, and their business is to stay home and labor and reproduce their kind...
...You have heard, you old stick-in-the-muds, that the trains are crowded...
...Some other quick thinker had got there before me, however, and had locked himself in, as I had intended doing, and wouldn't come out until we got to Topeka...
...Is this unhappy sensation of mine," I asked myself, "the result of what Darwin calls man's sensibilities, what Thomas Jefferson refers to as man's natural feeling for right and wrong...
...So I stood as far as K. C, where everybody who was on got off and everybody who was off got on...
...But it takes more than a quick thinker to frustrate me...
...The trains are swarmed, infested, overwhelmed...
...Confound it," I said, "I have got to give up my philosophy or my seat...
...I am going to hang on to this seat...
...I chose the present pain because, in contrast to the possible future pain, it was pleasure...
...Standing all the way to Chicago was painful...
...And, if it is, what becomes of the doctrine I imbibed from all the professors in college, that everything is relative and subjective, that there are no absolutes and universals, that there are, in consequence, no morals but only mores...
...I did not," I said to myself, a smile playing around my torn and bleeding lips, "choose the pain of standing up because there is any such thing as right and wrong or good and bad...
...I was a man bereft...
...In between these two mass migrations I grabbed myself a seat and hid my head in Joe Miller's Joke Book, which I always carry along with my Bible...
Vol. 7 • October 1943 • No. 43
