ANTAEUS AND ATLAS 145

depicted in the light of his own experience are sensations that Atlas is
experiencing while he is performing his interminable fatigue-duty of
holding up the Firmament.

The melancholy giant's state of depression can be taken for granted;

i a

holiday by temporarily taking the giant's burden on his own shoulders,
on the understanding that Atlas would employ his ticket of leave on the
mission of collecting for his temporary liberator a basketful of life-giving
apples from the neighbouring Garden of the Hesperides. Atlas duly per-
formed this part of the bargain; but, when he came back, apples in hand,
and, standing, for once, at ease, saw his intolerable load resting on other
stalwart shoulders, he was seized by a sudden overwhelming temptation
to play on his obliging visitor the mean trick of leaving him eternally
planti la in a stance in which it was impossible for the living pillar to get
out from under his incubus unless some voluntary substitute should
first step in under to relieve him. According to the Hellenic myth,
HeraklSs—stimulated to an unwonted intellectual activity by an emer-
gency in which brawn could not serve instead of brain—hit upon a ruse
for tricking the dishonest Titan into reassuming his pristine burden and
thereby enabling his temporary remplagant to slip out again after all.

We can now see, however, from a chance disclosure in Gershenson's
account of the Atlantean state of mind, that Atlas would inevitably have
retrapped himself, even if H£rakl£s had not had his uncharacteristic
'brain-wave'. For Gershenson's one idea of how to use an imaginarily
recaptured liberty is to reach up and touch the very Firmament from
whose pressure he imagines himself released; and the Atlantean touch
has a magic effect which is the opposite of the Antaean. When Antaeus
touches a motherly Earth, he rebounds from her bosom; but, when
Atlas touches a step-fatherly Heaven, he clamps the load down upon his
head. Atlas' predicament looks rather like a hopeless case. At infinity,
Atlas* interminable stance seems bound to lose him his life, either by
freezing him into the state of petrifaction that is a living creature's
penalty for having beheld the Gorgon's head,1 or alternatively by goading
him into Samson's suicidal act of pulling down the roof in order to die
with the Philistines.2 But we must not anticipate the sequel to the story
in our post-Marxian Russian version of it,

'Ivanov's answer to Gershenson contains the following significant pas-
sages :

* "I will tell you what is the real origin of the mood to which you are so
painfully subject at the moment. It is a reflection of a particular attitude
towards Culture—an attitude in which Culture is experienced, not as a
live treasure-house of gifts, but as a system of exquisitely subtle constraints.
That is not surprising; for, after all, the goal that Human Culture has
pursued has been, precisely to make itself into a strait-waistcoat. As I see
it, though, Culture is something very different: it is a guide of Er6s and a
hierarchy of venerations."

* This is the common fate of 'arrested civilizations' (see III. Hi. i-ni), 'fossils' (s«e
I. i. 35 and 90-92), and 'Tithoni* (see VI. vii. 47-52)-

2 judges xvi. 30.