The Centaur | Page 2

measures.

II
"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for
civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?"
--WHITMAN
"We find ourselves today in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of
society, which we call Civilization, but which even to the most
optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us,
indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the
various races of man have to pass through....
"While History tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it,
of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the
throes of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly
recovered from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy
condition. In other words, the development of human society has never
yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain definite and apparently
final stage in the process we call Civilization; at that stage it has always
succumbed or been arrested."
--EDWARD CARPENTER, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure
O'Malley himself is an individuality that invites consideration from the

ruck of commonplace men. Of mingled Irish, Scotch, and English
blood, the first predominated, and the Celtic element in him was strong.
A man of vigorous health, careless of gain, a wanderer, and by his own
choice something of an outcast, he led to the end the existence of a
rolling stone. He lived from hand to mouth, never quite growing up. It
seemed, indeed, that he never could grow up in the accepted sense of
the term, for his motto was the reverse of nil admirari, and he found
himself in a state of perpetual astonishment at the mystery of things. He
was forever deciphering the huge horoscope of Life, yet getting no
further than the House of Wonder, on whose cusp surely he had been
born. Civilization, he loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling
them with dust instead of vision.
An ardent lover of wild outdoor life, he knew at times a high,
passionate searching for things of the spirit, when the outer world fell
away like dross and he seemed to pass into a state resembling ecstasy.
Never in cities or among his fellow men, struggling and herded, did
these times come to him, but when he was abroad with the winds and
stars in desolate places. Then, sometimes, he would be rapt away,
caught up to see the tail-end of the great procession of the gods that had
come near. He surprised Eternity in a running Moment.
For the moods of Nature flamed through him--in him--like presences,
potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings
equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with
reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy
peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a
splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused
probably by a spiritual remoteness from their mood.
The Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature's moods
were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular
states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide the gateways of his
deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into
her own enormous and enveloping personality.
He possessed a full experience, and at times a keen judgment, of
modern life; while underneath, all the time, lay the moving sea of

curiously wild primitive instincts. An insatiable longing for the
wilderness was in his blood, a craving vehement, unappeasable. Yet for
something far greater than the wilderness alone--the wilderness was
merely a symbol, a first step, indication of a way of escape. The hurry
and invention of modern life were to him a fever and a torment. He
loathed the million tricks of civilization. At the same time, being a man
of some discrimination at least, he rarely let himself go completely. Of
these wilder, simpler instincts he was afraid. They might flood all else.
If he yielded entirely, something he dreaded, without being able to
define, would happen; the structure of his being would suffer a
nameless violence, so that he would have to break with the world.
These cravings stood for that loot of the soul which he must deny
himself. Complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration,
a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal
identity.
When the feeling of revolt became sometimes so urgent in him that it
threatened to become unmanageable, he would go out into solitude,
calling it to heel; but this attempt to restore order, while easing his
nature, was never radical; the accumulation merely increased on the
rebound; the yearnings grew and