The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, “Oh, yes! You’re . . . ah … um … named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who’s read a lot. Yes, Tom and I’ve made up our minds. We’ll announce our choice some time during the party.”

“I hope it’s me,” Peter said. “I really want to go with you.”

“Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,” Farrington said. “Experi­ence counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar.”

Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.

“This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I’ve been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow.”

Farrington smiled. “It really means that much to you? Why?”

“Well, I do want to get to the end of The River.”

Farrington cocked his eyebrows. “Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?”

“I don’t want millions, I want answers to my questions,” Peter said. “That’s a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.”

Farrington’s face lit up.

“That’s great! I’d heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don’t think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any.”

“Nietzsche admitted that he’d learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian’s novels,” Peter said.

“Nietzsche, hen? You know him well?”

“I’ve read him in both English and German. He was a great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that’s not fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn’t put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don’t go along with Nietzsche’s conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it’s been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.

“Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I’m thinking of isn’t Nietzsche’s. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who’s rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and.psychoses, who realizes his full poten­tial as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That’s the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.

“Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf.”

Peter paused, then said, “Have you read it?”

Farrington grinned. “Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?”

“I think he was more London’s superman than Nietzsche’s. He was London’s idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen’s brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen’s manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He’s part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can’t escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he’s subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen. ,

“But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong indi­vidualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn’t any Emma Goldman.