[This 1955 parable by LDS iconoclast Hugh Nibley was the basis of a short-story that was published in Dialogue last summer (and that the author was interviewed about for a Dialogue podcast last August). It would be worthwhile, then, to revisit the original Nibley text, which has always merited a far greater circulation, despite the man’s own renowned contempt for fame and wealth—the reasons for which he helpfully details within the following parable itself.]
…Imagine, then, a successful businessman who, responding to some slight but persistent physical discomfort and the urging of an importunate wife, pays a visit to a friend of his—a doctor.
Since the man has always considered himself a fairly healthy specimen, it is with an unquiet mind that he descends the steps of the clinic with the assurance, gained after long hours of searching examination, that he has about three weeks to live.
In the days that follow, this man’s thinking undergoes a change, not a slow and subtle change—there is no time for that—but a quick and brutal reorientation.
By the time he has reached home on that fateful afternoon, the first shock of the news has worn off, and he is already beginning to see things with strange eyes.
As he locks the garage door, his long-held ambition to own a Cadillac suddenly seems unspeakably puerile to him, utterly unworthy of a rational, let alone an immortal being.
This leads him to the shocking realization, in the hours that follow, that one can be rich and successful in this world with a perfectly barren mind.
With shame and alarm he discovers that he has been making a religion of his career. In a flash of insight he recognizes that seeming and being are two wholly different things, and on his knees discovers that only his Heavenly Father knows him as he is.
Abruptly he ceases to care particularly whether anybody thinks he is a good, able, smart, likable fellow or not; after all, he is not trying to sell anyone anything any more.
Things that once filled him with awe seem strangely trivial, and things which a few days before did not even exist for him now fill his consciousness.
For the first time he discovers the almost celestial beauty of the world of nature, not viewed through the glass of cameras and car windows, but as the very element in which he lives; shapes and colors spring before his senses with a vividness and drama of which he never dreamed.
The perfection of children comes to him like a sudden revelation, and he is appalled by the monstrous perversion that would debauch their minds, overstimulate their appetites, and destroy their sensibilities in unscrupulous plans of sales promotion.
Everywhere he looks he gets the feeling that all is passing away—not just relatively because he is saying goodbye to a world he has never seen before, but really and truly: he sees all life and stuff about him involved in a huge ceaseless combustion, a literal and apparent process of oxidation which is turning some things slowly, some rapidly, but all things surely to ashes.
He wishes he had studied more and pays a farewell visit to some friends at the university where he is quick to discover, with his new powers of discernment, that their professional posturing and intellectual busy-work is no road to discovery but only an alley of escape from responsibility and criticism.
As days pass, days during which that slight but ceaseless physical discomfort allows our moribund hero no momentary lapse into his old ways, he is visited ever more frequently by memories, memories of astonishing clarity and vividness—mostly from his childhood, and he finds himself at the same time slipping ever more easily into speculations, equally vivid, on the world to come and the future of this world.
The limits of time begin to melt and fuse until everything seems present but the present. In a word, his thinking has become eschatological.
“What has happened to our solid citizen?” his friends ask perplexed. He has chosen to keep his disease a secret; it would be even more morbid, he decides, to parade his condition.
But he cannot conceal his change of heart. As far as his old associates can see, the poor man has left the world of reality. Parties and golf no longer amuse him; TV and movies disgust him. He takes to reading books, of all things—even the Bible!
When they engage him in conversation, he makes very disturbing remarks, sometimes sounding quite cynical, as if he didn’t really care, for example, whether peppermint was selling better than wintergreen or whether the big sales campaign went over the top by October.
He even becomes careless of his appearance, as if he didn’t know that the key to success is to make a good impression on people.
As time passes, these alarming symptoms become ever more pronounced; his sales record drops off sharply; those who know what is good for their future begin to avoid being seen with him. He is hurting business, and dark hints of subversion are not far in the offing. What is wrong with the man?
As we said, his thinking has become eschatological. He lives in a timeless, spaceless world in which Jack Benny and the World Series simply do not exist. As he hears the news or walks the streets, he sees, in the words of Joseph Smith, “destruction writ large on everything we behold.” He is no longer interested “in the things of the world.”
The ready-smiling, easily adjustable, anxious-to-get-ahead, eager-to-be-accepted, hard-working conformist, who for so many years was such a tangible asset to Nulb, Incorporated, has ceased to exist.
Now the question arises, has this man been jerked out of reality or into it? Has he cut himself off from the real world or has cruel necessity forced him to look in the face what he was running away from before? Is he in a dream now or has he just awakened from one? Has he become an irresponsible child or has he suddenly grown up? Is he the victim of vain imaginings or has he taken the measure of “Vanity Fair?” Some will answer one way, some another.
But if you want to arouse him to wrathful sermons, just try telling the man that it makes no difference which of these worlds one lives in—that they are equally real to the people who live in them. “I have seen both,” he will cry. “Don’t try to tell me that the silly escapist world of busy-work, mercenary back-slaps, phoney slogans, and maniacal ‘careers’ has anything real about it—I know it’s a fake, and so do you!”
To conclude our parable, what happens to our man of affairs? A second series of tests at the hospital shows that his case was not quite what they thought it was—he may live for many years.
Yet he takes the news strangely, for instead of celebrating at a night club or a prize fight as any normal healthy person should, this creature will continue his difficult ways. “This,” he says, “is no pardon. It is but a stay of execution. Soon enough it is going to happen. The situation is not really changed at all.”
So he becomes religious, a hopeless case, an eschatological zealot, a Puritan, a monk, a John Bunyan, a primitive Christian, an Essene, a Latter-day Saint.