Passing By by Jerzy Kosiński

Author:Jerzy Kosiński [Kosiński, Jerzy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DEAD SOULS ON CAMPUS

When I taught at Princeton one of my students brought me a story he had written. “I’m sure you won’t like it,” he told me, “because in your work people die.”

I apologized for being a member of the nonrealistic school of fiction, and said, “You know, the very first time I saw you I got the strange feeling that you were going to die young.”

My student was dumbfounded: “I’m only twenty-two. That’s a terrible thing to tell a man!” he said, with real tears in his eyes.

“… To tell a man? But I’m talking about you. Didn’t you say that you’d be going to Vietnam?”

“Yes,” he answered.

In reality, of course, I had no such premonition of his death. I had simply wanted to shock him, to get an intense personal reaction out of him by making him aware of the one individual experience he could not escape: his own death.

This student typified many I have encountered on American campuses during the past few years. He was one of those in our society I call “dead souls.” At best, I find they share situations: they sit and watch films or television or listen to music in a group, thus isolated by a collective medium which permits each of them to escape direct contact with the others. Deafening sound effectively rules out every interchange. No one ever questions the intruding voice, for unlike an individual character, the collective identity requires no explanation or justification: it is, and that is enough.

Today, the attempt to define “Who am I?” is often replaced in each of our minds by the question, “Who do they want me to be?” or “With whom ought I to be?” Thus the knowledge we form of ourselves is nothing but a collective image which, like ubiquitous television, engulfs us. One image is interchangeable with another. But what about the self? I am convinced, and I see it manifested in almost every phase of modern living, from the corporate to the Woodstock ends of the spectrum, from the hard-hat executive to the professional revolutionary, that we are a culture of the denial of the self.

In its increasing collectivization, modern society offers every conceivable escape from the realization of self. Participation in the collective rites, such as mass-spectator sports, rock and pop festivals, is a stage in the loss of self, which has assiduously been rubbed off from earliest childhood by the collective-conformist eraser.

What the collective offers is the hypnotic notion that just as others are, and always will be, so one is and will continue to be; that one cannot fail because only individuals, setting standards for themselves, fail. The collective, at worst, only underachieves. As if betraying a profound guilt, the collective jargon sometimes tries to rescue a single face from the blur of the crowd. The phrase “doing one’s own thing” is really no more than a mockery uttered by people whose own thing is to be part of an amorphous supergang.

The entrapments of collectivism are

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