WARRIORS AND SLAVES

Today is my birthday.

The face that looks back at me from the mirror is the face of a man of sixty-five. My hair is grey and my hairline is receding, my skin is wrinkled and the lenses of my eyes are hardening. My arteries are hardening too. It is part of the program. The body is programmed to last for only a certain time. It will hold together, if treated properly, for about a hundred years. I have treated it properly. As a result it remains healthy. I never have a day's illness and seem immune to practically everything. But I cannot alter the program. No matter what I do my body will age, weaken, and finally disintegrate. The organizer that formed it in the first place and now holds together the atoms of which it is made will lose its power. The elements of my body will scatter like the beads of a necklace when the string breaks.

I have made the voyage of life aboard a ship of fools with a motley crew, each member of which thought itself important. I have been a mystic and a scientist, an author, a house builder, a boat builder, a gardener, a fisherman, a father of four children, a Whole-earther getting his food from the soil he cultivated. These various characters made up the crew of my vessel, and their often conflicting aims determined the course the vessel took. They argued, fought, stole from each other. Each tried for a time to become master of the ship. But now there is harmony aboard, and the various fools have made peace with each other. Their aims do not conflict, because none of them considers himself important. It's the effect of aging.

One thing I learned fairly early in the course of the voyage. It is our privilege as human beings to live either as Warriors or slaves. A Warrior is the master of his fate. No matter what fate throws at him, fame or infamy, health or sickness, poverty or riches, he uses the situation for his own inner development. He takes his motto from Nietzsche: That which does not destroy me strengthens me.

The slave, on the other hand, is completely at the mercy of external events. If fortune smiles on him, he struts and boasts and attributes her favors to his own power and wisdom — which, as often as not, had nothing to do with it. If fortune frowns, he whines and weeps and grovels, putting the blame for his sufferings on everything and everybody except himself.

I learned that all life games can be played either in the spirit of the Warrior or in the spirit of the slave. My life games were determined by the predilections of the various members of my ship of fools. The author dreamed of writing books. The scientist dreamed of performing experiments. The mystic dreamed of penetrating new worlds of the mind and of consciousness. The Whole-earther dreamed of a little farm on which he would be self-sufficient. The fisherman dreamed of the ocean with its white surf and floating seaweeds and of the good fish dinners it provides when conditions were right.

So each of the crew members had his own game.

I realized, again rather early, that I was far more slave than Warrior, and that if I ever wished to master my own fate, I would have to train myself to stop behaving slavishly.

In the course of my voyage I met several other Warriors who, by the example of their own lives, encouraged me to try to live in a manner worthy of a free man. To become a free man is no easy matter.

I have set down here a log of my personal voyage. I do not consider that voyage particularly inspiring, but I happen to know more about it than I do about anyone else's. I have included brief accounts of the voyages of others who managed to live in a manner worthy of a Warrior, though they did not necessarily think of themselves in these terms. There are conscious and unconscious Warriors, those who know what they are fighting for and those who just fight.

The genetic endowment that was dealt me by fate was not bad as genetic endowments go. I resulted from the union of a Teutonic knight and an English lady. My father, the Teutonic knight, was a descendant of that band of German adventurers who cajoled and bullied their way along the coast of the Baltic and carved for themselves large estates in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. They were all barons, and called themselves von this and von that and lorded it over the hordes of peasants. My father, who chose to live in England, dropped the von and called himself simply de Ropp. His gene pool had been further enriched by his Cossack mother, Lydia Gurjef (a name that, with a somewhat different spelling, was to become very familiar to me later), a wild spirit who came from the Crimea. My mother, a proper English lady, belonged to the Fisher tribe, which had its quota of distinguished members — a historian, an admiral, a banker — good solid members of the bourgeoisie, whose influence tended to stabilize the more volatile elements I inherited from my father.

As for the society into which I was born, it appeared at the time of my birth to be prosperous and safe. I entered the world in 1913, the last year of the great Age of Optimism. Most judges of human affairs assumed that, with the help of science, conditions of life would get steadily better and better. The great powers of Europe had carved up the rest of the planet. Kings, Kaisers, and Czars strutted and postured. Their representatives ruled millions of "natives" in various far-flung empires, of which the British was far-flungest. It stretched from Africa to China and was colored pink on the map. The structure looked stable enough, but before I was two years old the Age of Optimism ended. The whole towering system collapsed in a mess of mud and blood as the great powers of Europe used all the resources of their famous science for the sole purpose of tearing each other to pieces.

The sound of that crash reverberated through my young life and caused me, at a very early age, to feel alienated from the world I had entered. I remember being bundled into a blanket by my obviously terrified mother and hastily carried down from our upstairs flat to one in the basement. We lived in London, in Chelsea, near the river. The Germans were making their...