Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels

"Paracelsus would have liked you, Dr. Froats," said Maria: "he rejected the study of formal anatomy for a consideration of the living body as a whole; he'd have liked what you say about faeces being a creation. Have you read his treatises on colic and bowelworms?"

"I just know him as a name, really. I thought he was some kind of nut."

"That's what Murray Brown says about you."

"Well, Murray Brown is wrong. I can't tell him so for a while – maybe for a few years – but there'll be a time."

"Does that mean you've found what you are looking for?" I said. I felt that I had better get Maria away from Paracelsus.

"I'm not looking for anything. That's not how science works; I'm just looking to see what's there. If you start with a preconceived idea of what you are going to find, you are liable to find it, and be dead wrong, and maybe miss something genuine that's under your nose. Of course we're not just sitting on our hands here; at least half a dozen good papers from Froats, Redfern, and Oimatsu have appeared in the journals. Some interesting stuff has come up. Want to see some more pictures? Oimatsu prepares these. Wonderful! Nobody like the Japanese for fine work like this."

These were slides showing what I understood to be extremely thin slices of faeces, cut transversely, and examined microscopically and under special light. They were of extraordinary beauty, like splendid cuttings of moss-agate, eye-agate, brecciated agate, and my mind turned to that chalcedony which John's Revelation tells us is part of the foundations of the Holy City. But as Maria had been unsuccessful in persuading Ozy to hear about Paracelsus I thought I would have no greater success with references to the Bible. So I fished around for something which I hoped might be intelligent to say.

"I don't suppose there'd be such a thing as a crystal-lattice in those examples?"

"No, but that's a good guess – a shrewd guess. Not a crystal-lattice, of course, for several reasons, but call it a disposition towards a characteristic form which is pretty constant. And if it changes markedly, what do you suppose that means? I don't know, but if I can find out" – Ozy became aware that he was yielding to unscientific enthusiasm – "I'll know something I don't know now."

"Which could lead to -?"

"I wouldn't want to guess what it might lead to. But if there is a pattern of formation which is as identifiable for everybody as a fingerprint, that would be interesting. But I'm not going to go off half-cocked. People can do that, after reading Sheldon. There was a fellow named Huxley, a brother of the scientist – I think he was a writer – and he read Sheldon and he went to foolish extremes. Of course being a writer he loved the comic extremes in the somatotypes, and he lost his head over something Sheldon keeps harping on in his two big books. And that's humour. Sheldon keeps saying you have to deal with the somatotypes with an ever-active sense of humour, and damn it, I don't know what he's talking about. If a fact is a fact, surely that's it? You don't have to get cute about it. I've read a good deal, you know, in general literature, and I've never found a definition of humour that made any sense whatever. But this Huxley – the other one, not the scientist – goes on about how funny it would be if certain ill-matched types got married, and he thought it would be a howl to see an ectomorph shrimp and his endomorphic slob of a wife in a museum looking at the mesomorphic ideal of Greek sculpture. What's funny about that? He rushed off in all directions about how soma affects psyche, and how perhaps the body was really the Unconscious that the psychoanalysts talk about – the unknown factor, the depth from which arises the unforeseen and uncontrollable in the human spirit. And how learning intelligently to live with the body would be the path to mental health. All very well to say, but just try and prove it. And that's work for people like me."

It was getting late, and I rose to go, because it was clear that Ozy had shown us all he meant to show. But as I prepared to leave I remembered his wife. Now it is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one's friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer. But I thought I'd plunge.

"How's Peggy?"

"Good of you to ask, Simon. She'll be delighted you remembered her. Poor Peg."

"Not unwell, I hope? Of course I remember her as our top cheerleader."

"Wasn't she marvellous? Wonderful figure, and every ounce of it rubber, you'd have said. A real fireball. God, you should see her now."

"Very sorry she isn't well."

"She's well enough. But her type, you know – her somato-type. She's a PPJ – what Sheldon calls a Pyknic Practical Joke. Pyknic, you understand? Of course, Greek's your thing. Compact: rubbery. But the balance of her three elements was just that tiny bit off, a 442, and – well, now she weighs well over two hundred, poor kid, and she's barely five foot three. No; no children. She keeps cheerful, though. Takes a lot of night courses at one of the community colleges – Dog Grooming, Awake Alive and Aware Through Yoga, Writing for Fun and Profit – that crap. I'm here so much at night, you see."

I saw. The Rum Old Joker had been a bit rowdy with Ozy and Peggy, and even if Ozy's sense of humour had been more active than it was, he could hardly have been expected to relish that one.

As we walked up the campus together, Maria said: "I wonder if Professor Froats is a magus."

"I think he'd be surprised if you suggested it."

"Yes, he seemed very dismissive about Paracelsus. But it was Paracelsus who said that the holy men who serve the forces of nature are magi, because they can do what others are incapable of doing, and that is because they have a special gift. Surely Ozias Froats works under the protection of the Thrice-Divine Hermes. Anyway I hope so: he won't get far if he doesn't. I wish he'd read Paracelsus. He said that each man's soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. I'm sure Sheldon would have agreed."

"Sheldon appears to have had a sense of humour. He wouldn't mind a sixteenth-century alchemist getting in ahead of him. But not Ozy."

"It's a pity about science, isn't it?"

"Miss Theotoky, that is very much a humanist remark, and you must be careful with it. We humanists are an endangered species. In Paracelsus's time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder. If you want a magus, look for one in Clement Hollier."

With that we parted, but I thought she gave me a surprised glance.

I walked on towards Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with the faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of antjntenured Professor? As for myself, might it not appropriately be called the Collect for the Day?

Musing in this frivolous strain I went to bed.

I thought it would not be long before Hollier pushed Parlabane in my direction, and sure enough he turned up the night after I had visited Ozias Froats.