Mount Terminus: A Novel by Grand David

Author:Grand, David [Grand, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

PART IV

LOVE

Over lunch in the courtyard that afternoon, Bloom learned Dr. Straight was an experimental psychologist whose sense of self-importance was equal to that of Gottlieb’s and Simon’s, as his humble aim as a practitioner was to find a means to curtail the collective impulse to wage war. He held the belief that civilization’s instinct toward violence wasn’t teleological in nature. If it were by design, he posited, why then would God provide man a conscience? Why would his creator provide him a moral imperative to nurture and sustain life, then ask him to ignore it? A soldier is trained to kill not by appealing to the best of his humanity, but by systematically stripping his humanity away from him, through a methodical act of reshaping his perception of men outside his tribe as something other than men. He had long ago concluded that if men were given the tools to see from an early age beyond the limits of who and what they were at any given time—if they were given the opportunity to foster within themselves a heightened consciousness, one that raised them closer to the aspirations their creator conceived for them—this broader perception of themselves would prevent such methods from being effective. They would more easily see with what narrow concerns authority was wielded and wars were waged. It is a matter of inhibiting the aggression inherent in men, he said, and replacing it with cold, dispassionate reason. It was his opinion that the most effective means to broaden consciousness and inspire enlightened, rational thought was through the means of visual perception.

He’s on a mission, Isabella teased him, to achieve peace through optical illusion, to shine light into the eyes of the person living in darkness.

Dr. Straight looked at Isabella and kindly grinned. She likes to provoke me, he said. But she understands better than most what forces—what organized interests—summon men to war, and how these men, once indoctrinated, are irredeemably transformed on the battlefield. Those who have experienced the savagery I speak of, Joseph, the variety of savagery I participated in in the Philippines when I was a soldier, they normally refuse to revisit the horror because they’re too haunted and repulsed by the memory, in some instances too regretful for the atrocious acts they’ve perpetrated, in other instances so overcome by pride they can’t admit to themselves they were ordered to act in unconscionable ways, in ways that defy explanation, and in place of shame they choose bravado. Instead of healing their conscience, they choose to lean on the fictions of past glory and dwell in the darkest of silences, leaving the people who dwell in their ignorance of war to remain ignorant. For reasons I can’t adequately explain, said Dr. Straight to Isabella, I have been affected differently than many of my comrades. I’ve been filled with a righteous indignation and am more than prepared to play the foolhardy proselytizer for peace, however naïve I might appear.

But how, exactly, asked Bloom, does the conceit of visual perception aid your cause?

Dr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.