John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor

Both children looked up in surprise.

"Do you mean, sir, that Henry will be leaving us?" Ebenezer asked.

"I do indeed," Andrew replied. "In fact, if I be not greatly in error he hath already departed."

"But how is that? With never a fare-thee-well? He spoke not a word of leaving us!"

"Gently, now," said Andrew. "Will ye weep for a mere schoolmaster? 'Twas this week or the next, was't not? Thou'rt done with him."

"Did you know aught of't?" Ebenezer demanded of Anna. She shook her head and fled from the room. "You ordered him off, Father?" he asked incredulously. "Why such suddenness?"

" 'Dslife!" cried Andrew. "At your age I'd sooner have drunk him good riddance than raised such a bother! The fellow's work was done and I sacked him, and there's an end on't! If he saw fit to leave at once 'tis his affair. I must say 'twas a more manly thing than all this hue and cry!"

Ebenezer went at once to the summer-pavilion. Almost everything was there exactly as it had been before: a half-dissected frog lay pinned out upon its beech-board on the work-table; books and papers were spread open on the writing-desk; even the teapot stood half-full on the grate. But Burlingame was indeed gone. While Ebenezer was looking about in disbelief Anna joined him, wiping her eyes.

"Dear Henry!" Ebenezer lamented, his own eyes brimming. " 'Tis like a bolt from Heaven! Whatever shall we do without him?"

Anna made no reply, but ran to her brother and embraced him.

For this reason or another, then, when not long afterwards Ebenezer bade good-bye to his father and Anna and established himself in Magdalene College, at Cambridge, he proved a poor student. He would go to fetch Newton's lectures De Motu Corporum from the library, and would spend four hours reading Esquemeling's History of the Buccaneers instead, or some Latin bestiary. He took part in few pranks or sports, made few friends, and went virtually unnoticed by his professors.

It was during his second year of study that, though he did not realize it at the time, he was sore bit by the muse's gadfly. Certainly he did not at the time think of himself as a poet, but it got so that after hearing his teachers argue subtly and at length against, say, philosophical materialism, he would leave the lecture-hall with no more in his notebook than:

Old Plato saw both Mind and Matter;

Thomas Hobbes, naught but the latter.

Now poor Tom's Soul doth fry in Hell:

Shrugs GOD , " 'Tis immaterial."

or:

Source of Virtue, Truth, and All is

Each Man's Lumen Naturalis.

As might be expected, the more this affliction got hold of him, the more his studies suffered. The sum of history became in his head no more than the stuff of metaphors. Of the philosophers of his era — Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke — he learned little; of its scientists — Kepler, Galileo, Newton — less; of its theologians — Lord Herbert, Cudworth, More, Smith, Glanvill — nothing. But Paradise Lost he knew inside out; Hudibras upside down. At the end of the third year, to his great distress, he failed a number of examinations and had to face the prospect of leaving the University. Yet what to do? He could not bear the thought of returning to St. Giles and telling his formidable father; he would have to absent himself quietly, disappear from sight, and seek his fortune in the world at large. But in what manner?

Here, in his difficulty with this question, the profoundest effects of Burlingame's amiable pedagogy become discernible: Ebenezer's imagination was excited by every person he met either in or out of books who could do with skill and understanding anything whatever; he was moved to ready admiration by expert falconers, scholars, masons, chimneysweeps, prostitutes, admirals, cutpurses, sailmakers, barmaids, apothecaries, and cannoneers alike.

Ah, God, he wrote in a letter to Anna about this time, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling, had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Bookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground!

He was, that is to say, temperamentally disinclined to no career, and, what is worse (as were this not predicament enough), he seemed consistently no special sort of person: the variety of temperaments and characters that he observed at Cambridge and in literature was as enchanting to him as the variety of life-works, and as hard to choose from among. He admired equally the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic, the splenetic, and the balanced man, the fool and the sage, the enthusiast and the stick-in-the-mud, the talkative and the taciturn, and, most dilemmal of all, the consistent and the inconsistent. Similarly, it seemed to him as fine a thing to be fat as to be lean, to be short as tall, homely as handsome. To complete his quandary — what is probably an effect of the foregoing — Ebenezer could be persuaded, at least notionally, by any philosophy of the world, even by any strongly held opinion, which was either poetically conceived or attractively stated, since he appeared to be emotionally predisposed in favor of none. It was as pretty a notion to him that the world was made of water, as Thales declared, as that it was air, à la Anaximines, or fire, à la Heraclitus, or all three and dirt to boot, as swore Empedocles; that all was matter, as Hobbes maintained, or that all was mind, as some of Locke's followers were avowing, seemed equally likely to our poet, and as for ethics, could he have been all three and not just one he'd have enjoyed dying once a saint, once a frightful sinner, and once lukewarm between the two.

The man (in short), thanks both to Burlingame and to his natural proclivities, was dizzy with the beauty of the possible; dazzled, he threw up his hands at choice, and like ungainly flotsam rode half-content the tide of chance. Though the term was done he stayed on at Cambridge. For a week he simply languished in his rooms, reading distractedly and smoking pipe after pipe of tobacco, to which he'd become addicted. At length reading became impossible; smoking too great a bother: he prowled restlessly about the room. His head always felt about to ache, but never began to.

Finally one day he did not deign even to dress himself or eat, but sat immobile in the window seat in his nightshirt and stared at the activity in the street below, unable to choose a motion at all even when, some hours later, his untutored bladder suggested one.

Luckily for him (else he might have mossed over where he sat), Ebenezer was roused from his remarkable trance shortly after dinner-time by a sudden great commotion at his door.

"Eben! Eben! Prithee admit me quickly!"

"Who is it?" called Ebenezer, and jumped up in alarm: he had no friends at the College who might be calling on him.

"Open and see," the visitor laughed. "Only hurry, I beg of thee!"

"Do but wait a minute. I must dress."

"What? Not dressed? 'Swounds, what an idle fellow! No matter, boy; let me in at once!"

Ebenezer recognized the voice, which he'd not heard for three years. "Henry!" he cried, and threw open the door.