Dell's Journey

Chapter 45: Dell Becomes An Orator

His cheeks flushed and his heartbeat thumped in his

ears. His pores released sweat in a vain attempt to cool,

and thus calm him. Dell felt small, unkempt, un-cool. But

he really had something to say.

"We like to live," he said simply, yet earnestly.

He glanced around the dark disc anxiously.

"We prefer comfort to extreme cold or heat. We prefer

a full stomach to an empty one. We prefer peace to

conflict, the absence of pain to pain."

He paused.

"Don't we?"

His question suggested genuine wondering, even though

it seemed to all that his statements were, at very least,

conventional.

"We prefer the birth of our children to the experience

of watching their death. We prefer pleasure to an absence

of pleasure. We prefer to have our way rather than

another's way. You know?"

Dell laughed, partly from the embarrassment of public

speaking and partly from the hilarity of making obvious

statements as though they were profound.

"I have more statements to make," he continued, now

openly chuckling. "We all do what we think will please us.

Sure, sometimes we do the wrong thing and we up harming

ourselves, but we never intend to. We are driven to please

ourselves, even those of us who poke our skin with sharp

objects; high school students, mental patients, or people

with tattoos. We aim at a benefit of some kind. Sometimes

the benefit is immediate. Sometimes the good we aim at is

a long way off, but it is always the target."

He rose to his feet and popped some of his joints.

Monster looked up at him and gave him a look that said,

"You're really doing this?" Dell smiled again, blushed,

and went on:

"I know what you're thinking! You're thinking, 'What

about those who torture themselves, who make themselves

suffer for their guilt? The self-flagellating monks!

Don't worry: this is covered too. These people seek the

sweet relief of forgiveness, or an escape from mental

torture through distraction. Are these things not

evident?" he asked happily.

"Please, Dell," replied the Doubtmadon with courtesy,

"Come to the point."

"I only mean to say that pain and pleasure are not the

same thing."

He began to wander a bit from the center of the

towering disc, like a good public-speaker, and the sound of

his footsteps echoed. A few of the faces around the

outside moved cautiously into the dreary light. Dell was

surprised to notice that he was not alarmed at this, but

pleased, even inordinately so. He grinned broadly.

"You say, 'Life, death, good, evil; they are just

words.' Well of course they are! But they are words that

remind us of what we have all felt: good things and evil

things, pleasant and unpleasant, gentle and harsh. To

suggest that the words are arbitrary is to suggest the

obvious. To suggest that the concepts are arbitrary is too

much. You say, 'Will, create, expand, live!' But what if

I will to create a device that lays waste the globe? Shall

I create a super-virus that destroys Life?"

He surveyed the crowd. "Shall my one willful act be

to firmly bonk the smooth head of the Doubtmadon? I doubt

very much that these acts of will and creation would please

him much."

(More faces creeping quietly into the light, Monster

stretching and standing up as if waking out of sleep.)

"And another thing!" said Dell much too loudly, and

then laughed because he'd done it. "You say that to know

that we are is a profound perspective, a deep truth. But

really we can't be certain of this at all. Far from it!

We may not be. What does this even mean? It's nonsense.

(Ha! Ha!) I think you need to give yourself a different

name. You said we could be certain we exist, but surely a

'Doubtmadon' should be able to doubt his own existence!"

The Doubtmadon began, rolling his eyes, "Dell, even

Descartes went beyond –"

"You also said that the great thing about the 'new

mind' was that it acknowledged its own uncertainty. But

that's the joke! It doesn't fully acknowledge it, it only

partially does. It is a selective organ. It insists that

it knows it exists."