Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

It is really quite peaceful, in its way.

My dear young scholars: welcome. Today you have completed the thirteenth year of your lives. On such a day, a day on which you have left your old selves behind forever, it is fitting that I should reveal to you a momentous secret. For by the laws of our forefathers you are no longer children, as you were yesterday, but young men and women, entitled to the fullness of adult knowledge. Now, I have no doubt that you are wondering, as you sit here before me, on this day of days: What is that momentous secret of which I speak? It is nothing less, my dear ones, than the secret of our people. It is the secret that distinguishes us from all other people. It is the secret that makes us what we, and only we, supremely are. You are well aware, my dear young scholars, that throughout our long history we have called ourselves People of the Book. Today I ask you to consider those words carefully. What do they signify? They signify, to begin with, that we revere books; that for us the study of books is the highest of callings; that we hold all books to be a reflection, however dim, of the First Book of all; that we consider every moment spent away from books a punishment and a desolation of spirit; that we believe, in every fiber of our being, that books, far from leading us away from life, lead us directly to the center of life, to all that is vital and everlasting.

But that is not all we mean, that is not even primarily what we mean, when we call ourselves People of the Book. For by that proud title we mean that we trace our beginnings to books themselves. We mean, my dear young scholars, that we originate from books. We mean, if I may speak to you even more plainly, that books are our ancestors. And by “our ancestors” I wish you to understand, in the broadest sense, all those books that have been born in the world up to the present day, and, in the strictest sense, those first Twelve Tablets from which all others spring.

You are of course familiar, my dear ones, with the Book of Legends. You have studied its stories. You have discussed the six levels of meaning under the guidance of learned teachers. Now, it happens that within the many volumes of the Book of Legends there are pages you have not yet seen. You have not seen them because until today you were children and therefore shut away from forms of knowledge not suited to your years. Among those pages is the Excursus in the seventh volume, which in its full title is known as the Excursus on the Copulation of Books . There we are told that in the beginning, when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, the Creator breathed forth the first words onto Twelve Tablets of stone. In this manner the First Book was born. Mark well, young scholars, that I have been speaking to you of the first day of creation, before the light was divided from the darkness. I have been speaking to you of a time before the creation of man. Now, those Twelve Tablets, into which the Creator breathed the breath of his incomparable being, were living things. And as living things they possessed the powers that rightly belong to living things, among which are numbered locomotion and copulation. Thus it came to pass, in those days, after the earth brought forth its creatures, and all living things flourished and multiplied, that when one tablet lay upon another, a new tablet was born. So began the coming forth of books, each one reflecting the original tablets, but more and more faintly. The reproductive virtues of the original tablets were passed on to their offspring, who in turn brought forth new books, each giving back a less perfect reflection of the first ancestors.

My dear ones, listen. As the generations of man began to multiply and spread throughout the land, a great discovery was made. It happened one day that a scholar, reading in a garden, under the shade of a pomegranate tree, grew tired in the warmth of the afternoon. And laying aside his tablet of stone, he fell into a deep sleep. It chanced that a maiden, the daughter of the house at which the young man was teaching, entered the garden. And seeing the stone tablet, which lay in the grass, she picked it up and looked at it curiously. Then the maiden sat down in the grass, and placed the tablet on her lap; and in the heat of the sun, she soon fell asleep. And behold, the divine spirit, which breathes through the generations of books, was present in that tablet of stone, and passed into the womb of the maiden. Thus she grew big with child. In this manner our race was born.

You see by this story, my dear young scholars, that our ancestors were born of a union between a tablet and a maiden, which is to say, between the spirit and the body, the word and the flesh. Now, you may well ask whether this method of generation is in use among us today. Although stories of such couplings are told, yet we read in the Commentaries that the power of generation was lost long ago, when the offspring of tablets, though bearing within themselves a dim spark of the living breath that had animated the ancestors, no longer retained that fructifying power. But do not despair, young scholars. For the power of passing on that original breath is the gift of our people; and as we grow fruitful and multiply, we who derive, however slantwise, however remotely, from those first tablets of stone on the first day of creation, so we participate in the animating spirit of the universe, of which we are the guardians and the perpetuators.

Since the birth of our people we have spread to every corner of the earth, where we mingle with ordinary men and women. How then shall we know one another, we who are one people, yet live scattered among far-flung races? My dear ones, we are known to one another by the outward signs of our inward devotion: the intense application to study, the habit of inattention to the physical world, the rejection of external distraction, a fanaticism of the desk. By our signs you shall know us: the back laboriously bent, the neck frozen, the head immobile, the eyes burning, the arms still as stone. Only the fingers occasionally move — just enough, and no more, for the turning of a page.

But how, you may wonder, shall such a people, devoted as they are to the perpetual act of study, carried on single-mindedly during the course of an entire lifetime — how shall such a people, who seek each day, in the faded reflections of multitudes of generations of books, the original splendor of the lost Twelve Tablets — how shall such a people live? How shall we conduct our lives? How shall we, with our furious dedication to the word, pursue a life in the world, with its myriad distractions and temptations? In the Histories we learn that in ancient days the practical duties of life were given over to the care of women and failed scholars. In this way the gifted among us were able to pursue their studies without worldly distraction, at long tables in communal libraries, interrupted solely by two sparse meals taken in silence, and by four hours of sleep at night. But even in those days the authority of women, although limited, was by no means slight. Exiled from the entirely masculine world of study, forbidden to strive for the highest reaches of the human spirit, they were nevertheless so completely in charge of the practical world that the scholars in their libraries were dependent on them for their very lives. In more recent times, of course, young girls have been permitted to engage in study side by side with boys, and are no longer prevented from attaining the highest degree of worthiness, while the duties of practical life have fallen to those of both sexes who, after the fifteenth year, have proved unable to live in the loftiest realm of rigorous learning, and so devote themselves to the useful tasks that sustain and nourish our people.