The King Is Dead by Jim Lewis

Author:Jim Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428813
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

47

SPEECH FOR WALTER SELBY: DRAFT

My friends, my colleagues, fellow statesmen, lawmakers, soldiers, lovers, husbands, fathers and sons; you teachers and priests, bosses and toilers, outcasts, prisoners, slaves; my detractors and enemies; and all strangers, travelers, philosophers and savages, stretching to the corners of the world.

I stand here before you, with my case to make, unbound by the contingencies, the singularities, of this mighty House we call the World. It’s not the day that will judge me, but an endless night, the night into which our souls will venture, when the dream of day has passed from our eyes. I do not fear that judgment, nor do I seek it; but I offer myself to it, knowing that it will take me when it will, regardless of my little efforts to meet or avoid it.

I speak to myself when I speak to you; I preach to myself, berate myself, persuade and encourage myself. I ask myself: Who inhabits the farthest reaches of perdition? I answer: The traitorous, for there is no evil greater than that. —No death like the death of a principle mutually built, nourished, leaned against; and then dismayed, and then destroyed. The friend can flay those stored, tender parts that the enemy cannot reach. The friend: the mentor, the disciple, the apostle, the companion, the lover.

Nevertheless, we should not be cynical or quick to condemn, for that is to give away exactly the faith which the traitor would steal. Patience, forbearance, lenience, charity, are the qualities of the righteous man. We are not so dark that we cannot sense a light. Nor is our union so tentative and frail that it cannot withstand an occasional error on the side of forgiveness. The institution that it represents has been designed by wiser minds than ours, precisely so that it might survive even the bitterest disagreement. It dances to the thunder of the storm, and nourishes itself on the accompanying rain. There is hardly a good in this world that does not spring from an evil, hardly a growth that was not planted in death, like those rosebushes which, according to legend, grow wild around the grave of Saint Jerome.

But the wise man knows, too, that the face of the earth is populated with demons, adversaries and weird angels. They come with their soothing and musical voices, their passion indistinguishable from the passions of the saints; they plead with you for help, they beg you for understanding, compromise, mercy. They say they’re merely the agents of a greater power, and perhaps they are. Perhaps they are, but their agency results in nothing but ruin.

I believe in myself, my family, my friends; I believe in my associates, in my state and my nation; I believe in you. And I believe in that demon that waves a blade, and threatens to sever the bond that joins us together, and rescues us from solitude and misery. I kill that demon to save myself; I save you, I save my children, and my children’s children, and I refuse any mercy or reward in return.

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