His sensibilite made him shoulder not only the
inexcusable injustice which he had suffered but the incomparable and
overwhelming total injustice which everyone had suffered and was
suffering en masse day and night in The Enormous Room. His woes, had they
not sprung from perfectly real causes, might have suggested a persecution
complex. As it happened there was no possible method of relieving
them--they could be relieved in only one way: by Liberty. Not simply by
his personal liberty, but by the liberation of every single
fellow-captive as well. His extraordinarily personal anguish could not be
selfishly appeased by a merely partial righting, in his own case, of the
Wrong--the ineffable and terrific and to be perfectly avenged Wrong--done
to those who ate and slept and wept and played cards within that
abominable and unyielding Symbol which enclosed the immutable vileness of
our common life. It was necessary, for its appeasement, that a shaft of
bright lightning suddenly and entirely should wither the human and
material structures which stood always between our filthy and pitiful
selves and the unspeakable cleanness of Liberty.
B. recalls that the little Machine-Fixer said or hinted that he had been
either a socialist or an anarchist when he was young.
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