John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"What is Commencement?" I asked him through the screen. Croaker fried a decent pancake.

"Commencement is a conclusion," he replied at once. "There's nothing mysterious about it: when you've eliminated your passions, or put them absolutely under control, you've Commenced. That's why I call WESCAC the Grand Tutor. I can prove this logically, if you're interested."

I did not deny that I was interested, but pled shortness of time. Not to be discourteous, however, I asked him whether, when a man had reasoned his way to Commencement Gate, as it were, he truly felt Commencèd — for I had often heard Graduation described as an experience, but never as a proposition.

"Bah! Bah!" my host cried, with more heat than I'd seen him display thitherto. "That question leaves me cold!" The ejaculation confused Croaker, who mistaking it for some unclear but urgent command, galloped wildly about the observatory for some moments, knocking down the screen and upsetting a tray of watch-glasses before he could be calmed.

"There, look what he's done!" Eierkopf pounded him feebly on the head and wept a single tear. Like a frightened horse, Croaker still rolled his eyes and fluttered at the nostrils. "I would be a Graduate, if it weren't for him! I can't pass with him, and I can't live without him! Feel, feel, that's all people think of! There's feeling for you!" He indicated Croaker, who, quite placid now, had set his rider on a stool and was doing his best to tidy up the spilt watch-glasses. "If Commencement were a feeling, he'd be the Graduate!" Now Dr. Eierkopf laughed until a rack of coughing stopped him. "Maybe he is, eh?"

I said to soothe him that I could not imagine Croaker as a Candidate yet, much less a Graduate, though to be sure I admired his physical prowess; nor could I on the other hand accept the notion that Graduation was merely the end of a dialectical process. But in any case, I felt bound to remark, Croaker was not altogether devoid of reason, however imperfectly he employed it, nor was Dr. Eierkopf absolutely without emotion or appetite. Even as I spoke, tears flowed freely from his lashless eyes, a surprising sight, which he acknowledged as support of my observation.

"So maybe I'm not myself Commenced yet," he admitted. "But what else can Commencement be? You want spooks and spirits? Bah, George Goat-Boy! We look with our microscopes and telescopes, and what do we see? Order! Number! Energies and elements! Where's any Founder or Grand Tutor?" He tapped his gleaming skull. "In here, no place else. And in Tower Hall basement. That's all there is!"

I rose from the cot, where I'd been sitting with my coffee, and politely shook my head.

"I'm the Grand Tutor, sir. I'm going to ask Max and Dr. Sear about this GILES business as soon as I get through Scrapegoat Grate. But GILES or no GILES, I'm the Grand Tutor."

"I like you, Goat-Boy!" Eierkopf cried. "But how can you say such a thing?"

I admitted that I couldn't explain myself, and even that I had as yet no clear conception of what Graduation was; I acknowledged further that my conviction as to my Grand-Tutorhood was not unremitting — that I was subject to lapses of confidence and moments of bad faith, as well as errors of judgment and waverings of policy, just as Anchisides, Laertides, and for all I knew Enos Enoch had been. Yet it was persistent and prevailing, this conviction. I was the Grand Tutor, as surely as I was George the Goat-Boy! I had no ax to grind; I craved neither fame nor deference except in poor moments; I had come from the goat-barns to Pass All Fail All and would most surely do so, whatever that injunction might turn out to mean.

"And I promise you this, sir," I declared, stirred by my own rhetoric; "if it ends up being that Commencement is a miracle, then keep your night-glass and day-glass on me, and you'll see a miracle one day with your own eyes. Don't ask me how I know!"

Those same eyes squinted at me now behind their lenses, and either he shook his head or it dandled of its own accord.

"What a fellow you are!" he said — more pitying than awed. "Everybody has his weaknesses, and you know you can make me think of mine by speaking of yours, not so? So I don't believe in hocus-pocus, any more than Max Spielman did before he got senile. But what do I do in weak moments? I try to take nature by surprise! I try to catch her napping once!" He laughed at his own folly, which it nevertheless plainly excited him to confess. He would sometimes stare at the furniture of his observatory for hours on end, he declared, at the familiar books and instruments in their accustomed places, and contemplate the inexorable laws of nature that held them fast, determined their appearance and relations, and governed his perception of them. And he would find himself first fretting that the brown pencil-jar on his desk, for example, could not suddenly turn green, or stir of its own inexplicable volition; from a fret that such wonders could not be, he would come to a wish that just once they might, thence to a vain and gruntsome willing that they be — as if by concentration he could bring the miracle to pass. And this coming naturally to nothing, he would lapse at last into a melancholy of several days' duration, after which, as a rule, he was fit to take up once more the orderly business of his life.

I glanced uneasily at the clock.

"Who wants to see the Founder, or the Founder's son?" Eierkopf exclaimed. "No! But what if some little messenger-spook should drop once out of the sky — not to bring you a personal message, but maybe just to ask directions… Or what if you discovered even his footprint in the grass, where he'd lit for a moment? Less than that, even!" He indicated the shelves of the room with a roll of his eyes. "Just to see a sign once, that things were thinking their own thoughts. A little voice in the air, ja? One little leaf to move the wrong way all by itself, that's all it would take; I'd know right away… But bah!" He waved away such speculation. "I got to get ready for the eclipse. Croaker shows you where to go."

There was indeed little time; but when I'd thanked him for his hospitality and frankness, and expressed my hope that we might see each other another time under less upsetting circumstances, I couldn't resist asking him what exactly it was he'd "know right away" if, to use his expression, he should once catch nature napping.

"Forget I said it," he replied, as gruffly as his piping voice permitted. "There aren't any mysteries; just ignorance. When something looks miraculous it's because we're using the wrong lenses. Ja, that reminds me…" He said something in another language to Croaker, who, smiling grandly, brought me my stick. At various places along its length now had been affixed little lenses, concave and convex, mounted in shiny steel rims that swung on pivots. Moreover, the stick had been cleverly drilled through from tip to tip, and slotted transversely in such a fasion that certain of the lenses could be swung down into the bore.

"A little matriculation-gift to go with Croaker's," Eierkopf said. "Mirrors and lenses are my favorite things." He showed me, when I'd thanked him for the gift, how by selecting the proper lenses and sighting through one end or the other, I could use my stick as either a telescope or a microscope, and make fire with it as well.

"Look all around the University," he advised me. "You'll see stars and planets you didn't know about, and girls undressing and doing things with their boyfriends. You'll see your blood cells and your crablice and your spermatozoa. Some things that look alike you'll see to be different, and some you thought were different will turn out to be the same. But you can look from now until the end of terms, and you won't see anything but the natural University. It's all there is."