Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!
In a previous column in this space, I held forth the opinion that Conan’s speak to Belit in Queen of the Black Coast that he was content with the pleasure and danger of wine, women, and war, and he asked no more of the gods than strongly to strive and fight was the most elegant and trenchant oratory in favor of intemperate life, to blaze brightly, if briefly, ever penned.
The question then becomes, what is the second most? I offer as a candidate this hortatory as penned by Robert Heinlein in GLORY ROAD to those the high, elusive and glorious dreams convoked by storybooks :
What did I want?
I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.”
I admire such sentiment, but have never felt it, since I was born old, and have always admired asceticism, self-control, temperance, moderation, and stoicism.
So it is with a lift of my supercilious eyebrow above my cold, abstemious eye that I note in passing that, like Conan’s heaven-defying boast of being content with simple, sinful pleasures, that our hero Oscar Gordon, at the end of GLORY ROAD, likewise finds his life as a prince consort so empty of meaning, so boring, that he vows to venture into danger again, but, oddly, for its own sake this time, not to save a princess or a world or anything.
Which sounds as if the egg of the roc is not enough, once you find it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
