the road he is following is a nice new road leading to Newton, where there is a nice
eating place recommended to him by a friend in his office. The botanist looks around
and sees his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and
classified units such as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns, and for him, this is
reality; to him the world of the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm)
seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy, never- never world. Finally the world of the local
farmer differs from the two others in that his world is intensely emotional and personal
since he has been born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and
every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection with his
everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns which the
other two—the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist—simply cannot know in
the given place at the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the
surrounding vegetation to a botanical conc eption of the world, and the botanist will know
nothing of any importance to him about that barn or that old field or that old house under
its cottonwoods, which are afloat, as it were, in a medium of personal memories for one
who was born there.
So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different
realities—and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a
dog, a hunter with a dog, a dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl
out of gas— In every case it would be a world completely different from the rest since
the most objective words tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally
different subjective connotations. Indeed, this subjective life is so strong that it makes an
empty and broken shell of the so-called objective existence. The only way back to
objective reality is the following one: we can take these several individual worlds, mix
them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it objective reality.
We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a
particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at a lovely field
and imagining upon it a lovely factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole
these mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality that we hold up to the
light in our test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that
transcends optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty
emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king may find his rightful
place), of pity, pride, passion—and the craving for a thick steak at the recommended
roadside eating place.
So when we say reality, we are really thinking of all this—in one drop—an average
sample of a mixture of a million individual realities. And it is in this sense (of human
reality) that I use the term reality when placing it against a backdrop, such as the worlds
of “The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “The Metamorphosis,” which are
specific fantasies.
In The Carrick” and in “The Metamorphosis” there is a central figure endowed with a
certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or
figures of horror, asses parading as zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats. In “The
Carrick” the human quality of the central figure is of a different type from Gregor in
Kafka’s story, but this human pathetic quality is present in both. In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde” there is no such human pathos, no throb in the throat of the story, none of that
intonation of “‘I cannot get out, I cannot get out,’ said the starling” (so heartrending in
Sterne’s fantasy A Sentimental Journey). True, Stevenson devotes many pages to the
horror of Jekyll’s plight, but the thing, after all, is only a superb Punch-and-Judy show.
The beauty of Kafka’s and Gogol’s private nightmares is that their central human