Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/473
V becomes closer to my understanding. It is violence, vice, virtue, vain, etc. It almost always appears in a word which expresses a deep bodily need, a deep H which society looks upon as evil. Thus, evil.
eeeeeee (V) I’ll. One is ready to go from the passive taking pleasure of eeeeeeeee to the forceful creating-larger-space-by-giving of I’ll (I will). But V which is society’s warning (now I have it—the sound and the letter v are societies TNT sign), break the action, the impulse from eeeeee to I’ll. So it is evil.
And Devil (eh is the masquerade, the submerged echo of eeeeeeeeee) is D(eath) to-and-of evil. That is death kills you for being evil, but in the language of the soul it is the passport to evil (to Hell, or to the Heaven where one can do what one wishes. So virtue. It is half of X which is the death of Christ, the death of H, the death of the impulse, V is half of X because it is merely a warning, it is not the complete scissors, the cutting of death. It is the scissors whose handle is not yet present to be exercised.
Anyway: virtue: The warning to I (to eeeee passivity and longing) that are (r) active life must be reduced to the t (thing) which is u (you) in order that e (little E—the contentment of strong E) to be possible. Virtue is renunciation. Virtue is thinking of others. Virtue (complete virtue) is a complete renunciation of the growth of the child, who starts as an infant being all of the universe, and by giving locates the you, the it, of the universe—by taking which of course always comes first it is returned to the universe again.
But the outside of the universe is first a t, a thing. Long before the knowledge of others as people is the knowledge of others as things. So virtue takes one’s own feelings and deposits them in the it, the thing, the other, it makes You more important, more worthy than I. So, in the deepest sense it is a perversion of H, a virtue of society—an aid to society—for virtue is depersonalization and virtue permits society to mechanize man for society’s sake and not for man’s sake. The consonants are beginning to pay off.
