in which all is unalloyed goodness. Here is attar of roses without a thorn." Hence the fly in the ointment: embalmed in balm. And our repugnance.
"I am a fool," said Richard to himself, "to be floundering round in this easy, cosy, all-so-friendly world. I feel like a fly in the ointment. For heaven's sake let me get out. I suffocate."
Where to? If you're going to get out you must have something to get out on to. Stifling in unctuous sympathy of a harmless humanity.
"Oh," cried the stifling R. "Where is my Rock of Ages?"
He knew well enough. It was where it always has been: in the middle of him.
"Let me get back to my own self," he panted, "hard and central in the centre of myself. I am drowning in this merge of harmlessness, this sympathetic humanity. Oh, for heaven's sake let me crawl out of the sympathetic smear, and get myself clean again."
Back to his own centre—back—back. The inevitable recoil.
"Everything," said R. to himself, in one of those endless conversations with himself which were his chief delight, "everything is relative."
And flop he went into the pot of spikenard.
"Not quite," he gasped, as he crawled out. "Let me drag my isolate and absolute individual self out of this mess."
Which is the history of relativity in man. All is relative as we go flop into the ointment: or the treacle or the flame. But as we crawl out, or flutter out with a smell of burning, the absolute holds us spellbound. Oh to be isolate and absolute, and breathe clear.
So that even relativity is only relative. Relative to the absolute.
I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.
No, the self is absolute. It may be relative to everything else in the universe. But to itself it is an absolute.
