I have to correct an earlier statement. A small reference library existed in a comparatively modest mansion in an out-of-the-way district of heaven. The contents of most of the books there might have seemed to you and me, reader, a sort of astronomy except that they lacked the speculation that characterises the subject as we know it. The other books were dry reading indeed, being a sort of annal or chronicle except that each volume reported the events of an aeon rather than a year.
In this library, a few days after the knocking had been first heard, an angelic personage who considered himself or herself or itself a capable amateur historian unearthed, as he/she/it put it with clumsy humour, the explanation for the unusual event. It was recounted in a certain chronicle that a certain god much given to caprice and whimsy had long before set a small door in the farthest west wall mentioned previously. (For the sake of this narrative, it must be supposed that the door was well concealed on both sides and that the god concerned had later forgotten about it.)
The gods and goddesses knew little and cared less about Earth, but once the existence of the door had become widely known, their fondness for competing and speculating and betting caused them for several evenings to outlay large sums of heavenly currency on the answer to the question: what was the field of endeavour of the person knocking? (They were too ignorant of earthly matters to bet on the identity of the knocker.)
The meagre information available in their library caused a majority of the divinities to bet that the person knocking was some or another prophet or the founder of some or another religion. A sizeable minority staked their money on the person’s being a composer of music or a painter or sculptor. The smallest minority bet that the person at the concealed door was some or another writer of poetry or plays or even of prose fiction.
The gods and goddesses would have had no opportunity for speculating or wagering if their library had included the sort of book that filled the library of the writer of these paragraphs and if even one god or goddess had read the last pages of a certain one of those books, which pages the writer had read often. The book, which was first published in 1958, was a translation from the French language into the English language of a biography of a certain writer of prose fiction who was reported by his biographer as having seen that final door at last fly open at which, before him, no one had ever knocked.
The divine ones, however, knew nothing about the biography mentioned or about its subject and were able to enjoy much suspense and much anticipation of profit from betting while one of their number went one evening at last to the place where the knocking had sounded for day and night after day and night and found there the concealed door and opened it, and greeted the person standing on its further side and got from the person an account of himself or herself and afterwards politely dismissed the person and then closed the door or, perhaps, left the person standing at the open door while he or she, the god or goddess, hurried back to the crowded dining room and there blurted out that the person at the door claimed to be the author of an enormous work of prose fiction although he seemed no more than an asthmatic little poofter from a place called Paris.
In the mind of a man who was barefoot and wearing only shorts and a singlet and was drinking beer in a room where the drapes were drawn against the sunlight, an image appeared of a man who was wearing what the first-mentioned man was wearing and who was drinking what the first-mentioned man was drinking in a room such as the first-mentioned man was in.
If an image of a man can be said to be of a certain age, then the image-man mentioned and the man mentioned were of the same age: forty-seven years and two hundred and twenty-two days. The man did not know it on the day mentioned, but he was to live for at least a further twenty-two years from that day. If an image-man can be supposed to suspect such things, then the image-man surely suspected that he had not long to live although he may not have suspected that he would die on the following day, which was, in fact, the day when he died.
To express the matter otherwise: the first-mentioned man was drinking beer in his shorts and singlet on the day when he became as old as the image-man had been when he had died, seventeen years before, as a result of a haemorrhage in some or another digestive organ. His death, as one of his biographers wrote, was a typical alcoholic’s death.
The first-mentioned man had sometimes supposed that he himself would die a typical alcoholic’s death, although he drank mostly beer whereas the image-man, so to call him, had drunk mostly stronger drinks. The first-mentioned man had even supposed at one time that he would live the sort of life lived by the image-man. The man had first supposed this after he had read during his twentieth year a work of fiction by the man who later became the image-man. Nearly fifty years after he had read the work of fiction, the man could recall in detail many of the feelings that he had felt while reading, although he recalled from the text of the book only the words you drive all day and you’re still in Texas.
When the man supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived, he was not so foolish as to have been influenced by any so-called movements said to have arisen as a result of the image-man’s writings or opinions. The man understood that the image-man had begun to follow his own way of life and to write his own sort of writing as long ago as the 1940s and many years before words such as beatnik and hippie would be made popular by certain journalists. The man supposed that the image-man’s way of life was too much his own to be summarised or defined. The image-man, who was often supposed to have preached against the conventions of society, so to call them, included in one or another of his books of fiction a passage in which the first-person narrator wanted no more than to be in his middle age a railway worker drinking beer in the late afternoon on his front veranda and talking to his best friend, who lived in the house next door.
The man who had once supposed that he might live as the image-man had lived — that man had lived for many years in a modest house in a suburb that might have been called lower middle class. The man worked in a government department, in what was sometimes called a middle-level position. He had been married for many years to a woman whom he had first met when they worked in the same building. He and the woman had two children. Only on some evenings and at weekends did the man try to follow the example of the image-man by drinking beer and by trying to write fiction.
Soon after the image-man had died, one after another biography was published. The man bought and read most of the biographies and learned from them, among many other matters, that the image-man had spent much time during his last years drinking beer and trying to write fiction. He was married by then to a wife who had been one of his childhood friends. During his last years, his wife would hide his shoes to prevent him from going to some or another bar and drinking whisky and other drinks.
The man, who had never felt drawn towards any political party and had never signed any petition or any document protesting against any war or any seeming-injustice — the man read with interest in one or another of the biographies mentioned a report of the image-man’s having been visited late in his life by two young persons whose shirts were printed with slogans protesting against a certain war being waged by the United State of America. The biographer supposed that the young persons had expected the image-man to welcome them and to sympathise with their political views, but he had stood at his front door with a can of beer in his hand and had told them that he would not utter a word against his country and had then driven the young persons away.