“Sit down,” said Bill.
I took one of the armchairs, one that faced the windows, so that I could gaze at the view. The small vehicle I had seen—a pickup truck—was now close to the town. Without warning, the music of The Great Gate of Kiev from Moussorgsky’s Pictures At An Expedition poured forth around me into the room.
“I thought,” said Bill from behind me, “that we ought to have some place just for sitting....”
He was still being shy. The tones of his voice carried half an apology, half an entreaty to me to like what I saw around me.
“It’s really magnificent, Bill,” I told him and turning, saw him standing at one end of the windows, looking out himself. “Who’s been building all this for you?”
“I’ve been doing it myself,” he said.
I took a long look at him. I had known he was a good man in many ways; but I had never thought of him as a carpenter, mason, or general man of his hands. He looked back at me stiffly.
“I wanted to surprise people,” he said. “Only just now you seemed jolted by what happened, so... I actually wasn’t going to tell anyone until I had it all finished, the books on the shelves, and all that.”
“Look. This room’s the best idea you could have had,” I told him.
I meant it. God knows, if anyone ever loved reading, it was me. I was no longer looking at the view now, I was looking at the books, beginning to feel in me a stirring of excitement that I would not have guessed was still possible. The books were suggesting a million things to me, calling to me with a million voices. Maybe only a handful of those voices had anything to tell me about the things I really needed to know; but the possible smallness of their number did not matter. It was me against the time storm and I was humankind; and what was humankind was locked up in those codes of black marks on white paper that had once filled libraries all over the earth.
Suddenly, I wanted to know a million things, very strongly. There was the dry ache in my throat and the fever in my head of someone athirst and lost in a desert.
25
I was reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s short story “The Dead” in his collection Dubliners:
“Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead.”
There was something there I told myself, tight with certainty. There was something there. A certain part of humankind and the All. A tiny something; but something.
I put down that book and went to find the words of Ernest Hemingway, in the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year...
Something... I went looking further.
Hui-Nan Tzu, in the second century before Christ, had written:
“Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous. Therefore it was called the Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the universe.... The combined essences of heaven and earth became the yin and yang...
Sigmund Freud:
“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast...
Tennyson, in The Passing of Arthur:
Last, as by some one deathbed after wail
Of suffering silence follows, or thro’ death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle, but no man was moving there....
Einstein, What I Believe:
“It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings. Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations...”
“Do you feel it?” I asked, looking at the Old Man as the two of us sat alone in Bill’s library. “Do you feel it, too, there— someplace?”
He looked back at me out of his fathomless, savage brown eyes without answering. He was not my companion in the search for what I sought. Only a sort of trailer or rider who hoped I would carry him to the place which would satisfy his own hunger for understanding—that hunger which being part of the monad had awakened in him. It was his curse not to be quite human—but still not to be simply a beast, like Sunday, who could love, suffer and even die, unquestioningly. It was something I could see, like a heavy load on him; how he knew he was dependent on me. After a second, he put a long hand lightly on my knee, in a nearly beseeching gesture that had become habitual with him lately and stirred my guts each time he did it.
So we continued; he with me, and I poring over the books in the library, along with many more Bill had since brought me from the surrounding territory. What I was after was still undefined, only a feeling in me of something that must be there, hidden in the vast warehouse of human philosophy and literature. But I kept finding clues, bits and pieces of thought that were like gold dust and stray gems spilled from the caravan of knowledge I tracked.
I had not concerned myself about it during the first few days of this. But after a week or two, it occurred to me to wonder that no one, not Marie, or Bill, or even Ellen, had been after me to take charge of our community, once more. The wonder brought with it both a touch of annoyance and a sneaking feeling of relief. I was bothered that they did not miss my help more; but at the same time, I felt in my guts that what I was doing was by all measures more important than being an administrator. So, the summer colors outside the window dried and brightened to fall ones, then faded to the drab brown of winter grass and the occasional white of snow, with only the different hues of evergreen to relieve the scene; and I came to understand that my presence was required, so to speak, only on state occasions.