Weston once more looked all round him uneasily. “It’s all true, you know,” he said at last. “What’s all true?” said Ransom.
Suddenly Weston turned on him with a snarl of rage. “It’s all very well for you,” he said. “Drowning doesn’t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It’s all true, I tell you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life,” said Weston. “Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race . . . trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It’s all rot, do you see?”
“And something else is truer!”
“Yes,” said Weston, and then was silent for a long time. “We’d better turn our fishes head on to this,” said Ransom presently, his eyes on the sea, “or we’ll be driven apart.” Weston obeyed without seeming to notice what he did, and for a time the two men were riding very slowly side by side.
“I’ll tell you what’s true,” said Weston presently. “What?”
“A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out-and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.”
“What do you mean by saying that’s truer?”
“I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.”
Ransom said nothing.
“Lots of things,” said Weston presently. “Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night-and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all means.”
“I’m not quite clear-” began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him.
T “That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now-a thin little rind of what we call life, ut on for show, and then-the real universe for ever and ever. o thicken the rind by one centimetre-to live one week, one day, one half hour longer-that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say “What difference does a short reprieve make?” What difference!!”
“But nobody need go there,” said Ransom.
“I know that’s what you believe,” said Weston. “But you’re wrong. It’s only a small parcel of civilised people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows-Homer knew-that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.”
“You don’t believe in God,” said Ransom.
“Well, now, that’s another point,” said Weston. “I’ve been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t is say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it. Perhaps your God does exist-but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn’t see it; but one day you will. I don’t think you’ve got the idea of the rind-the thin outer skin which we call life-really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It’s about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe-He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time-which you think comforting! In other words He stays put: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We “move with the times”. That is, from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call ‘Life’, or He may not. What difference does it make? We’re not going to be there for long!”
“That could hardly be the whole story,” said Ransom. “If the whole universe were like that, then we, being parts of it, would feel at home in such a universe. The very fact that it strikes us as monstrous-”
“Yes,” interrupted Weston, “that would be all very well if it wasn’t that reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe. Even the ordinary scientists-like what I used to be myself-are beginning to find that out. Haven’t you see the real meaning of all this modern stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don’t say it in so many words, of course, but what they’re getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they’re dead-the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn’t there. ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’, ‘true’ and ‘false’-they’re all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them.”
“If all this were true,” said Ransom, “what would be the point of saying it?”
“Or of anything else?” replied Weston. “The only point in anything is that there isn’t any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they are ghosts. What else is there to do?”
“I get the idea,” said Ransom. “That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing.”
“But specially,” said Weston, “on whether he’s inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink”
They ploughed forward for a few minutes in silence over waves which were now growing larger. The fish seemed to be making little headway.
“Of course you don’t care,” said Weston. “What do you people in the rind care about us? You haven’t been pulled down yet. It’s like a dream I once had, though I didn’t know then how true it was. I dreamed I was lying dead-you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a person who was all falling to bits-like a tramp, you know, only it was himself not his clothes that was coming to pieces-came and stood at the foot of the bed, just hating me. All right,” he said, “all right. You think you’re mighty fine with your clean sheet and your shiny coffin being got ready. I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what you come down to in the end.”
“Really,” said Ransom, “I think you might just as well shut up.
“Then there’s Spiritualism,” said Weston, ignoring this suggestion. “I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm-slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.”