Mind of an Outlaw by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

even
The Village Voice
, which is remarkably conservative for so young a paper, and deeply patriotic about all community affairs, etc., etc., would not want me either if they were not so financially eager for free writing, and a successful name to go along with it, that they are ready to put up with almost anything. And I, as a minority stockholder in the
Voice
corporation, must agree that this paper does need something added to its general languor and whimsy.
    At any rate, dear reader, we begin a collaboration which may go on for three weeks, three months, or, the Lord forbid, for three-and-thirty years. I have only one prayer—that I weary of you before you tire of me. And therefore, so soon as I learn to write columns in a quarter of an hour instead of the unprofitable fifty-two minutes this has taken, we will all know better if our triflingbusiness is going to continue. If it does, there is one chance in a hundred—make it a hundred thousand—that I will become a habitual assassin-and-lover of a columnist who will have something superficial or vicious or inaccurate to say about many of the things under the sun, and who knows but what some of the night.

On Lies, Power, and Obscenity

(1956)
    A WARNING : The column this week is difficult. True to my commitment to the
Voice
, I wrote it quickly. Because I do not want to lose all my readers at once, I suggest that all but the slowest readers pass me by this time. If you are not in a mood to think, or if you have no interest in thinking, then let us ignore each other until the next column. And if you do go on from here, please have the courtesy to concentrate. The art of careful writing is beginning to disappear before the mental impotence of such lazy audiences as the present one. Thought, after all, is one of the two prime pleasures available (at least theoretically) in a rational democracy, the other being sensual love, politely called the pursuit of happiness.
    SINCE A NEWSPAPER column is supposed to be concerned with communication, it would not be the worst idea to attempt to trace what communication might be.
    Thought begins somewhere deep in the unconscious—an unconscious which conceivably is divine—or if finite may still be vast enough in its complexity to bear comparison to an ocean.Out of each human being’s vast and mighty unconscious, perhaps from the depths of our life itself, up over all the forbiddingly powerful and subterranean mental mountain ranges which forbid expression, rises from the mysterious source of our knowledge the small self-fertilization of thought, conscious thought.
    But for a thought to live (and so give us dignity) before it disappears, unexpressed and perhaps never to be thought again, it must be told to someone else: to one’s mate, to a good friend, or occasionally to a stranger. It is in the act of telling a thought that the thought—no matter how unlikely—may be convincing to another, and inspiring him or her to some small action. Needless to say that small action is not likely to be the one we have suggested, but it is an action to which we have been the tangential father. We have at least, no matter how crudely or ineptly, succeeded in communicating something, and the actions of others, as well as our own, are the result. In the rigorous sense there is no communication unless action has resulted, be it immediately or in the unknown and indefinite future. Communication which does not lead to new action is not communication—it is merely the abortive presentation of new social ideas or the monotonous transportation of old ones.
Lies
    But an old social idea is a lie. Where it is not sheer premeditated falsity (four-fifths of gossip columnists’ spew, for example) it is at best a description of something which no longer exists. Society at any moment is the stubborn retarded expression of mankind’s previous and partially collected experience. Yet our previous experience is the past, it is our knowledge of death, and