—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.
-Stephen Dedalus to Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I should add to the list ‘my home, my fatherland, or my church’ the words ‘revolutionary organisation’, ‘the vanguard’, ‘the Marxists’, etc. Otherwise, I could not have said it better myself. I wish to live by the immortal words of Stephen Dedalus, and live for myself and for my art. My soul is my own, not that of Alan Woods or the International Marxist Tendency. They don’t get to decide how my story ends. They are history, whilst my arms stretch expectantly towards the shining sun of the future. Janus-like, I look with one face at the black misery of my past life, and with the other, I look ahead towards new things – new thoughts and feelings, new ideas, new books and new people. I now realise, more than ever, how carefully I must guard my inner light from being snuffed out by the filthy, impudent hands of lesser men.
When I first joined the organisation, I was warned off reading ‘impure’ thinkers like Nietzsche and Camus. I have gone back to them. And I have decisively rejected Marxism and its lies in favour of the existential burden of a free life with all of its fateful choices, without a central committee or a branch secretary to give me orders and turn me into their pitiful drudge.
I have much to regret. But I am also lacking in time. So I will try to regret as little as possible and to live as much as possible. I have just started reading Ulysses, something I would never have gotten the chance to read if I was still in that disgusting cult. That by itself is a blessing. I am thankful to my struggling soul for leading me out of the subterranean darkness of my subjection to falsehood to the light of freedom in truth. At last I can breathe, think and feel anew, as a human being and not as a robot, mechanically repeating cliches and slogans like magical incantations before a stultified audience that has been trained to applaud each idiocy like seals. My ex-comrades can stick to reading Alan Woods’ moronic book on philosophy if they so choose. I hope that they will choose more appropriate ‘spiritual food’ (if I may appropriate a term from the Jehovah’s Witnesses) in the future.