The Noble Gesture Recently I contacted some very interesting facsimiles of Captain Frank de Wolfe of the United States Army, who was wounded at Fort Donelson in 1862. You may think I am talking about a past death; I am not. I am talking about a sympathy facsimile picked up when I was about a year and a half old, evidently, on the death of my great-grandfather.

I almost killed myself. I started running out a lot of emotional curves and life began to look more and more interesting, and then when I went to get up out of the chair I couldn’t get up. I wondered what this was all about so I began to run some more emotional curves, and then I suddenly recalled that my great-grandfather had a black cane with a solid-gold dog’s head. It was a great little gimmick, this solid-gold dog’s head.

The facsimile which I had just finished running out was the facsimile of the death of my dog when I was fourteen, which tied in to the cane with the dog’s head, which was the death of my great-grandfather that occurred while I was still sick with pneumonia when about a year and a half old. Evidently my legs from the waist down had been out of valence most of my life.

It is very interesting that you can get such tie-ins. Of course, you know that you can have a service facsimile for practically anything under the sun that has happened to you. You undoubtedly have engrams and counterefforts that have to do with being walked over by elephants and smashed and with being caught in riots of the Republicans trying to elect Abraham Lincoln or something. In fact, as was not suspected at the beginning of Dianetics, you have an enormous number of these things. So you can always tailor one up to match your circumstances; you can always do that.

Now, we are going to go over a very romantic, mean-sounding subject: dead men’s goals. It sounds like something that, when I was just out of college and scrambling around, I might have written for Adventure magazine — dead men’s goals.

There isn’t a person around who isn’t living forward in his time continuum on ambitions he does not want, does not need and cannot fulfill, simply because he is finishing off the life of a dead man. It’s a grim little subject, isn’t it?

I ran head-on into this mechanism in July of 1950 in the study of what we called “coffin cases.” Many a preclear would lie down on the couch and cross his arms on his chest, and you would say, “All right. Now, let’s run through a time when you were very excited.”

And he would say, apathetically, “Okay.”

This person was lying in a coffin, obviously. Some person, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, would look like somebody of forty, fifty or sixty. This was fascinating. Why? What was the survival advantage of being dead?

I asked a lot of questions of myself, and as a matter of fact, through asking these questions, I ran into past deaths. This was somewhat on the order of being the engineer of a freight train going down the track minding its own business somewhere in Iowa, and all of a sudden finding himself in the Belgian Congo driving a circus wagon. My perplexity was the perplexity of an engineer who ran into that sort of a situation, because that is practically what happened.

The theory I started working on starts out simply with this: A child or a human being is standing around a stiff (you will forgive me that use of the word; I know the dead are “holy”and “one must never speak evil of the dead — the dogs!”) and everybody comes in and looks at the coffin; they look upon the painted face of the corpse and they say, “Poor Aunt Bessie. She was really a good woman.”

Three days before her death they were saying, “Aunt Bessie! Bah! A disgrace to the family! Do you know that she once accepted a diamond ring . . . And, my dear, you know . . .” This was Aunt Bessie just before she kicked off.

But here is Aunt Bessie lying in the coffin and everybody says, “God bless her. I hope she goes on to the great beyond and gets her just reward. She was a noble woman; she was a good woman.” The little child hears this and he says, “How do I get sympathy? How do I get sympathy? That’s easy — I just have to be dead like Aunt Bessie” and is thereafter Aunt Bessie.

Maybe this is the way it works. I never had a chance to find out if this was the way it worked.

In order to make a test run, then, you say to the individual, “Go back to the time you died.” (I would say to myself, “Naturally, he will find himself in the coffin with Aunt Bessie. That’s a simple way to test it.”)

Then the preclear says, “I hate to tell you this, but there’s a boa constrictor chasing me!”

So you think, “Well, it’s wonderful, wonderful. Hallucination is just wonderful.” And you say, “Well, come back to present time.”

He says, “All right,” in sort of a dazed tone of voice and gets up off the couch. And nobody can run him. His case is stopped right there! Before this he ran easily on the track.

But you say, “Oh, well, it was a shock to him. He’s suddenly become a dub-in case. Next case! Lie down on the couch. All right.” You are going to find “Aunt Bessie” this time. So you say, “All right, go back to the last time you died.”

The fellow says, “Ow!” “What’s the matter?”

“A horse just stepped on my face!” “Well, where are you?”

“Let me think for a minute. It’s the Battle of Antietam.”

You say to yourself, “Well, obviously it’s hallucination.” “Come up to present time.” His case wouldn’t run either. But that’s beside the point — in research you want to find things out!

“Next case. Go back to the last time you died.” “Ow! “

“What’s the matter with you?”

“A Masai has just run me through with an assagai.” Three minutes before, this person hadn’t known a Masai from Pepsi-Cola.

It became a problem. After I had loused up ten or twelve cases I realized that we were running into the laws of engrams. You know there are laws of engrams and laws of delusion. Recently we brought in a number of psychogalvanometers. One of these days we are going to run somebody through an engram and then we are going to get a dub-in case and run it through dub-in, registering each one on the psychogalvanometer to see how excited the person gets and so forth. Then we will be able to read it by meters; it will all be on meters and it will say, “There is actuality on the recall of pain and there is a certain set of laws that delusion runs on too.” You have to have a meter in order to convince psychiatry of anything. (Actually, you have a pretty hard time trying to convince them of any reality on anything, particularly themselves.)

Anyway, we tested out these past deaths on a psychogalvallometer. A person would run into one of these deaths and the needle would go wham! He would run into birth — wham ! He would run into the last time that somebody knifed him for sleeping with the wrong woman — wham! But when he ran into delusion the needle just bumped over a little. Another delusion, and it ticked a bit. So we said, “Well, that’s very easy. We run him into some ‘delusory experiences’ like these past deaths and so forth” — wham! Just like that!

I didn’t catch up with four or five of those early cases. One was in the Foundation recently and I didn’t tell him so, but his case hasn’t run since. But we got the rest of them that I had run back into these deaths and we ran off the deaths. We ran them off, and they reduced like engrams — after I had made another interesting experiment.

A fellow had gotten into one of these past deaths. He was at sea; he was dying on shipboard. The whole ship was coming to pieces. The spars were all falling down. He got his foot caught in a bit alongside the deckhouse and he couldn’t get off with the rest of the sailors, and there he was. He was busy drowning and objecting to it. It wouldn’t reduce. I ran it and ran it but it wouldn’t reduce. So I said, “Go to the death necessary to resolve this case (snap!)” — not knowing a person would ever have any more than one of these things kicking around.

The fellow went sliding back down the track and hit another incident where his shipmates were so glad to get rid of him they wouldn’t throw him a box (I think it was back in Phoenicia or someplace) and he drowned in that incident. We ran that incident and then the later one reduced.

I thought, “This is very, very interesting. I wonder if they’ll reduce any faster than that.”

I had simply said, “Go to the death necessary to resolve the case” — bang! He ran it. He was never the same man afterwards: He was in good condition. He spoke to people when they spoke to him. He was the most normal man around the Foundation.

All this gave one a little bit of pause. Here was obvious phenomena.

Sometimes somebody would be very skeptical and with the early techniques you couldn’t run a person into one of these things unless he was willing to move on the track. However, with Effort Processing it is not necessary to have anybody’s permission to go into any such incident. You just say, “Now, what is the effort to keep your blood circulating?” (That is a good one.)

All of a sudden the preclear is choking and gasping, and you say, “Where are you? What are you doing?” — very mystified about the whole thing.

“I’m dying! What do you suppose?” This fellow had been very skeptical a few minutes earlier.

Sometimes the first somatic that you will ever be able to get on a case you get just by picking a random psychosomatic and asking for the effort and counter-effort with regard to it. You find this person dancing on the side of a cliff to an ode to the moon or something of the sort, and at this point the ground slides away and he gets killed. He gets a somatic for the first time. His case runs well afterwards if you run out the past death. You desensitize the data in one of those lifetimes merely by running the death of it.

Why is this? I didn’t realize this until a very short time ago: It is regret. A person always regrets dying. I regret dying — don’t you? It isn’t very important anymore, but it is something that one normally regrets. One still has a bunch of coupons from the supermarket he hasn’t cashed in or something, so he has this regret.

If you were to take a case and just take all the regret off the whole track from algae to present time, you would start blowing grief charges all over the track and you would find something very interesting: the individual’s occlusions on his past deaths would resolve.

I have made one test on this which was very peculiar, but some people have followed into this. They start working Self Analysis and they start straightwiring too far back. It says, “Do you remember a time you were glad to say good-bye to somebody?” And the fellow will slip through it and say, “Must be a movie I saw. Girl standing on this balustrade and . . . Seems kind of real! Her name’s Isabelle. Yeah, her name’s Isabelle. Yeah. Boy, I was sure glad to get rid Where am I?”

In other words, these death experiences contain an enormous amount of regret, and a death is an invalidation of having lived. The life was not successful because the person died out of it, so he just says, “Well, the whole life isn’t successful,” and he just moves all the data aside.

But where does the natural-born Nimrod suddenly start out from? He walks out with a BB gun when he is ten years of age and starts knocking all the sparrows off the telephone wire, and at twelve years of age he wins a couple of trap shoots, and then he starts firing with mirrors and over his shoulders and so forth. He can’t miss targets. How did he get that way? Talent, of course — but it might be an awful lot of training too. It might be a great many generations of training. Maybe he was a dub at shooting eight generations ago, but he improved. He probably made a postulate to himself when he was lying behind a barricade stuffing the powder and ball into a flintlock and saying, “Missed again! They’re going to get me in about two minutes, but I’ll see if I can get another one. Missed again! You know, I’ve got to learn how to shoot!” So he sort of picks the tomahawk out of his skull and goes to his “great reward,” which is birth.

So, here are phenomena, and you can keep reproducing these phenomena just endlessly.

For a while I began to worry whether or not a person wasn’t just picking deaths out of someplace or other — whether they were his own line continuum. But they evidently are his own line continuum.

There is this line that you call a “theta body” — that is to say, it is just the collected memories of one individual and his individuation — and this goes along all by itself: conception, birth, growth, momentary pausing and doing something, decay, death; conception, birth, growth, off on the plane and out again; conception . . . It is a cycle.

Then there is this unending line of protoplasm, and it runs from conception up to maturity, a sexual act and a conception, then another line up to the next conception, another line and so on. That is the protoplasmic line. It follows the generations of parents, children, then children, more children, children, more children, children, and so on down the line. And that is what gives you your structural line. But that structural line is enormously modified by this theta line.

Now, how this theta line ties in and where it chooses up is kind of beside the point. But the funny part of it is that the body itself, having once been endowed with life, hangs on to it to some degree, so there is a third line: After death, you sometimes find a person kicking around in a coffin or in his skeleton for a while. You very often get some little child who has terrific nightmares about skeletons and coffins, and he reads Edgar Allan Poe (or some of the stories I used to write!) and he gets horrors about these things.

You start processing this individual and you run into some interesting phenomena. I ran into this very early in the game of investigating this life-continuum theory. I said to one fellow, “Now what are you doing?”

“Well, I’m lying here in a farmhouse. I’m dying.”

“Well, all right, let’s go to the moment you died.” “Okay.”

“All right, now let’s go to the moment you take off.” “I don’t.”

“What happens to you?”

“Well, they put me in a box and they bury me.” “All right. Where are you now?”

“Well, fingernails seem to still be growing.” “Where are you now?”

“Well, I’ve kind of decayed.” “Where are you now?”

“Well, my chest bones just caved in.” “Where are you now?”

“Well, I’m sort of just dust, I guess; nothing much else.” “Are you out of there yet?”

“No. I will be, another fifty years or so.” “Well, go to the time you got out of there.” He did.

You can get off on this track. Then you say, “Now let’s go back to the death and let’s get the time when you take off.”

“All right.” He runs through this physical-body continuum — in other words, a little bit of theta hanging around with the physical body for a while — and then he comes back to the moment he died and you get this thing that you normally get with almost everybody when you run a past death. They don’t realize that it is so standard. What you want to do is get somebody right off the street who doesn’t know anything about this at all; you will find that the same phenomena repeats itself consistently.

So, he dies and the next thing you know, he is way up someplace looking down, saying, “So what?”

You say, “Well, let’s go back to the moment you start to die.”

“Oh, weep, boo-hoo. How can I leave them?” You get regret and so on, and then he is up there looking down and he says, “So what?” There is a definite tone change.

There are a lot of people who have been hung up in one of those “so what’s.” I know — I used to think when I was a young writer that nearly all editors were!

So here we have three lines of continuum. You will find the genetic line can be recovered. You can send somebody back down his family line or his genetic line and so on, but it is not an individual line. You don’t get individuality this way; you get bodies. And the preclear gets pretty confused because the theta line is where he is actually traveling, evidently.

On this theta line, you would suffer to see how some of the boys — particularly those with an engineering background — went into action on the lines of “how do you get an individual back from a death to the moment of the continuance of the protoplasm?” That is to say, how do we get this individual coming up to the end of track and dying and then coming back and being himself as his protoplasm line?

Darwin and the rest of them introduced an arbitrary a long time ago — that they didn’t know any more about than you do — when they talked about this “unending line of protoplasm.” Of course, this has worked out very well in the field of cytology. It doesn’t happen to be very well accepted in the field of biology. But it is an arbitrary.

“Why do you keep working it that way?”

“Well, it’s impossible for a person who is death to procreate!”

You say, “Why does it have to be on a genetic line?” Then you suddenly realize what these boys are doing: They are following out the theory that all is matter — ”There is nothing but a material universe. There is only energy, space, time; that’s all.” That is a very narrow-sighted sort of a view, isn’t it? I would hate to work a problem after somebody had put down in front of me only 50 percent of the factors I needed to resolve it. They say, “Now, you’ve got to solve this problem but you can only solve it with 50 percent of its factors.”

We had to go out into some very interesting mathematical lineups in Dianetics in order to get anything. I have been very interested in getting hold of a book on quantum mechanics. I want to convert all the infinities to zero and all the zeros to infinity in it and see if it won’t work for a change (quantum mechanics doesn’t work), because in Dianetics, quite as a byproduct, we have proven that zero equals infinity, not one divided by infinity. You might not care too much about that, but let me tell you that there are individuals in colleges whose whole lives are spent in the bloody battleground of whether or not the square root of one is or isn’t. They are serious.

Anyway, this theta line is evidently a very simple line: A fellow merely goes on living and then kicks off and he goes on living some more and kicks off and goes on living some more. It seems awfully simple. The theta line, however, gets very, very badly messed up, because a person is busy regretting his dying; he thinks it is important.

It was all theoretical as far as I was concerned — it was just observed phenomena and so on — and I hadn’t realized in any attitude of my own living that anything had changed, till one day I was driving down the street and a cop came tearing up on a big motorcycle with the red lights flashing and so on — ”Pull over to the curb!”

“Sure, I’ll pull over to the curb.” It was a funeral.

Along came this big hearse with a coffin — there were silver handles on the coffin — and then cars, cars and more cars. Suddenly it occurred to me that if a Dianetic auditor could set up shop out at the cemetery, he could do a hot business just blowing grief charges, blowing off the death! (“Ten bucks, lady. Blow your grief off.”)

The next thought that occurred to me was “Boy, are those people being fooled — are they being fooled about this whole thing!” They are talking about this individual going to the great beyond and his great reward; they look at it as finality. This is the end.

And I thought, “Well, two or three years from now, someplace around Wichita, there’ll be a little kid kicking people in the shins and so forth. Everybody will shove him in the face. And he will be Joe Glutz, the great banker! “

By the time the second policeman came along, following the procession, I was laughing. This cop really looked at me hard. All of a sudden it occurred to me that these people were indulging in a very nice rite but they were missing the whole show.

I drove on down the street and the colors had turned up — way up above what they had been before — just on the realization “What do you go along through life being afraid of? You go along through life being afraid of dying. Well, why do you go along through life being afraid of dying? That’s silly.”

Take any person around and run a past death on them and they will say, “Oh, how did I get back here? My, I was a sweet girl. Yes, my family loved me very much.” Or “The idea of being killed in such a fashion — it’s outrageous. It’s a disgrace! Makes me feel awfully unimportant.” It sort of changes your viewpoint.

Now, I could give you a talk on reincarnation, also on transmigration. Down through the years and in various places there have been a lot of guesses, and they were very interesting. The Egyptians thought that an individual who didn’t mind his p’s and q’s became a bug and maybe transmigrated off into some other species and finally worked back up into being a human again. (I don’t know why he wanted to work to that level, but that is what they said.) They thought this was the way life ran.

Reincarnation is an old idea. This idea I know is at least thirty-five hundred years old. People have been talking about reincarnation for a long time. And then some people brought reincarnation into disgrace by insisting on having been Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Cicero or Bach or Mozart and so forth.

Of course, the funny part of it is that these people are still with us someplace. But there also is a phenomenon where a big personality along the line someplace seems to shatter and get on to a lot of theta lines, or it even seems to start theta lines sometimes. Talk about unknowns!

So, you will run into the phenomena of reincarnation. Nobody has ever had these phenomena before. It isn’t just an idea. And you can demonstrate it to your own satisfaction. From individual to individual, it doesn’t go along as a lot of hallucination; it goes along according to a set of natural laws. It becomes very fascinating. This doesn’t mean the ancients were right, but it sure means that I was bewildered.

When you get life laid out in such a fashion, your values have a tendency to change.

Now, I don’t know how much a knowledge of this would change this particular subject, dead men’s goals. But there is such a tremendous desire on the part of a living organism to keep other organisms alive, to help, to alleviate the pain in the world, to shoulder the burdens of all God’s creation, that an individual gets pretty scrambled up on his theta line. If you want to straighten this theta line out, you have to know something about these phenomena.

A fellow dies and for some reason or other his friend goes into his valence. Don’t think for a moment that his friend does not continue to live his own life; he does. He lives his own life plus the dead man’s life, which makes his own life kind of complicated sometimes. And as far as I can tell at this time, it doesn’t do a bit of good to do this. People just do it.

A dog dies and fifteen years later you find the dog’s mistress, now a grown young lady, being cute at parties, acting like the little dog. She is carrying that dog’s life along with her.

If you ever wanted any substantiation of the validity of the concept of the eight dynamics, believe me, it is contained in this idea of dead men’s goals — this life-continuum theory, to be much more technical and proper. (Let’s make it complex so that the professors will appreciate it!)

So, here we have Grandpa and Grandma and so on: When these people are alive they have a certain influence upon the preclear, but when they are dead the preclear keeps on trying to live their lives for them. We all know this phenomenon of one human being trying to live another human being’s life for him: “Now, Willie, you’ll have to go to school. You’d better do this. And I want you to get good grades. You know, I never had an opportunity like this when I was a boy. You’d better engage in this kind of a business, and you’d better do this and go here and go there.” There is that kind of living someone’s life, but there is this other fabulously noble, heroic picking-up of the theta burdens — not the responsibilities, just the theta burdens — of the dead person and going on with them. I am not quite sure that, at the basic assessment, psychosomatics are not broadly out of this mechanism.

I checked back on a few cases and I found an individual who was very, very worried that he was going to go insane. We checked out his family and we found out that his grandmother had gone insane. This would make it look, according to the present-day evaluation (“all men are dogs” is the present-day evaluation; the communists say they are slaves and then go on to prove it), as if this person were just unduly worried because he had heard of heredity. That is not the way the mechanism works. Unless you know this other mechanism, you are not going to solve that worry; you won’t take that worry away from this preclear. Why? Of his own free, open- hearted will, he is carrying on his grandmother’s worry about being insane. He just reached out and picked it up.

It would be an awful joke on the human race to find out at this late date that it actually was that noble — that all that goes wrong with anybody is trying to make everybody go on living.

A supporting fact is that we consider it quite heroic for a man to lay down his life on the third dynamic; we play that up a great deal in our stories. There is a lot of other data around.

If you want to solve or get some sort of an investigation going in a case, you will find that practically everything that is wrong with the case or everything the person is trying to do that he really doesn’t want to do is on account of somebody who is dead or who is at least out of the running and no longer in circulation. You can assess the thing out that way.

Yes, you can knock it out by running engrams, but the funny part of it is that you don’t find all the engrams on a case when you start in. You get all the engrams you can lay your hands on and that is all you can get. The person feels much better and life is running along fine — only you didn’t take away that one particular fear or problem. You can’t quite understand why you were never able to get the reason this person had to sit down to the dinner table and beg like a dog. There is a dead dog someplace on the case, that is all.

An individual has a very bad back; he feels swaybacked. He will tell you that he is swaybacked and so forth. We go back and we don’t find anything one way or the other till all of a sudden we run into him in his youth standing on a street corner looking at a swaybacked horse and thinking, “Isn’t it terrible; that swaybacked horse has to carry a man and a saddle. It’s practically going to break his back.” So he picks it up and carries it for the horse. I don’t know that this does the horse any good but I do know that men do it.

Now, there was a polio case in at the Foundation a short time ago — a little girl from Indiana. She is standing by herself. She had been an immobile case — a bed case. It will probably take two or three months for her muscle tissue to build back to a point where she will be able to walk and be as active as a child of fourteen should be. This girl is well, through a minor miracle. What do we find at the bottom of this case? According to the auditor’s report on the thing, we find that she saw another little child and the other child had polio, and she felt sorry for the other child so she went home and got polio. That was the start of it! And there she was, bedridden for many years — sympathy for this other person and so forth.

Now, one can add it up and say, “Well, the reason human beings do this is very simple. It’s because they want sympathy. They’ll do anything to get sympathy.” I am afraid that is just somebody’s 1.5 engram talking. It is silly!

Of course, an individual does discover that there are times in his life when he is dependent upon other people. But one of the surest ways in the world you can get yourself in trouble is to help somebody. Just for a moment, think of somebody you have tried to help. You didn’t ask for gratitude, you didn’t ask for anything. But sooner or later you got hit.

What did Shakespeare say about the “wintry winds and fangs of ingratitude” or something of the sort? According to an old Chinese proverb, that person who has mentioned twice that he has helped somebody else has been amply rewarded. And that is all the pay there is, because the individual is going to resent it.

Parental-child relationships are sour, really, only for one good reason: The child cannot contribute equally to the parental contribution. This demonstrates the child to be much less powerful than the parents; it puts him in a bad way. He goes out to build up some of his own potential; maybe that is why he carries on dead men’s goals. But he does! H-e goes out and he sees some pitiful sight in the world and he is triggered. He says, “Why, that’s too bad,” he picks it up, presses it to his bosom and he is sick. Then people come around and give him sympathy and it gets really complicated. But the purity of the nobility of that gesture is unquestioned. There is nothing but an altruistic computation behind it. You can investigate it if you want to. You won’t find the person saying “Now, let’s see, if I get sick like Bessie is, why, my parents will have to be nice to me.” However, you will find the child occasionally going around saying, “Well, when I die, boy, are they going to regret it. They’re going to feel sorry for me.” You are going to find that! But you are also going to find this child merely being spontaneous about the thing, saying, “It’s too bad. I’ll take it on.”

A child, evidently, or the human being, at the time he does this, feels well and strong and able to support these things. It is only later when he is staggering under his own burdens and all the other burdens of the world that he begins to fold up under this. Then he wants to get rid of some of these burdens.

But what burdens will he get rid of? He will get rid of his own! He won’t give up the other person’s. What are we, a flock of saints? That is the way it works.

You try to spring a chronic somatic off somebody who is carrying it for somebody else who is dead and you are going to have a little fight on your hands. You won’t solve it by fighting about it. You will solve it by getting the first time he felt sympathy for this other person or the first time he felt sympathy for the condition. You get the first time he felt sympathy for the condition and then you can unlock the chain, but not otherwise.

He will hold on to his own integrity to that much more solidly than his integrity to himself. It is a very peculiar race that we live in.

If this amount of nobility, sainthood and altruism were actually let alone, this race would probably go along at a heck of a rate. But I think people are so busy being altruistic that they raise hell with each other — ”Oh, so you won’t let me help you, huh? I’ll fix you! “ By the way, that is about the fastest way you can get into a fight.

Go out sometime and find some marital group where the husband or the wife is fighting continually; take the most combative and punitive partner aside and have a little talk with them. You say, “Well, now, Joe, what’s wrong? What’s wrong, Joe?”

“Well, she’s — ” yakety-yakety-yak — a lot of accusations and so on. “Yeah, but when did this start?”

“Well, it started pretty young — a long time ago, when we first got married.” “What are you trying to do for this woman, Joe?”

“Well, that’s just it! I wanted to help her do this, I wanted to get her that, I wanted to try to get this other kind of a position so that she could do this or that, and she won’t listen to it! She doesn’t think it’s worthwhile. She doesn’t think it’s this way, and she doesn’t think it’s that way.” He will cover it up by interlarding it with “. . . and she keeps saying I’m stingy, and I’ll show her I’m not stingy!” and so on. It is all tangled up, but the middle strand of it is “She won’t let me help her; she won’t let me contribute.” Even contribution is really an improper word on it. “She won’t let me help her.”

You ask her and if she is in apathy she will tell you, “Well, I can’t help him. I realize that I can’t.”

You could take people who are known in their neighborhood as being the most reprehensible gadabouts, drunks, who treat their kids badly — people with a bad reputation — and get them aside and shake down the problem without any suggestion to them at all, and you would find that their basic difficulty is that they can’t help each other enough.

It’s a funny race we live in, isn’t it?