William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Suffer barbaric childhood to give and receive remorselessly; civilized age learns to protect what it has, to neither give nor accept freely, to trust its own mistrust above faith, and intriguing others above the innocent. Intrigue, after all, is rational, something the mind can sink its teeth into, and defeat it with the good digestion of reason, a hopeless prospect for the toothless heart, and God only knows what innocence will do next. So prudence rescues the emotions, and exiles them out of reach, countenancing only anxious glances from what another hero came forth from the desert to call "the hesitating retinue of finer shades."

In the unilluminated hallway where Olalla stood in her niche, he paused the ball of a thumb on the saint's broken nose, and smiled, the same involuntary smile of recognition that had lightened his face, and left it and come back, remaining each time a little longer and more fully extended, trying the unfamiliar terrain, since his arrival.

Childhood, the plain-dealer: nothing approached it but upon intimate terms. It's the shades of experience that afford shadows of fear, but the black-and-white of childhood discovers the intimacy of terror. Here, benign Olalla suffers the plunder of her face with wistful gravity in her stone eyes, empty now of the vengeful malice with which they had threatened blind justice upon unwary passers- by; and the hand, once poised to smash a passing skull, now lay flat up in benediction. What greater comfort does time afford, than the objects of terror re-encountered, and their fraudulence exposed in the flash of reason? Triumph! as though it were any cleaner, or happier, or more bare of disappointment, than the deadening shock of re-encounter with the object of love.

Songs of innocence and experience.fill the head so empty of aching that the ache is forgotten, a brawl, but an orderly one, a sequence of decorous violence as neatly carried forth as the fight between the Pleasant and the Unpleasant Thoughts in Handel's Almira.

There were no clocks anywhere in sight or hearing.

— And hmmm… he did, did he? And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the Lord, by the Chamber of Nathan-melech. . hmm, Melech? Melich? the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire. .

This came, borne from behind the study door on the pungent vehicle of caraway, into the hall where he stood about to knock.

— And he put down the idolatrous priests, and hmmm whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense hmmm hmmmph unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven. .

Though the words stopped, the caraway came on, unladen but maintaining a belligerent calm out into the hall where he lowered his hand without knocking. Then as he turned from the door he said to himself aloud,

— How safe I am from accident here.

— In the precious blood of…

— Janet!

— Yes, she answered in a loud clear whisper, — I knew you would return. She stood before him with her gloved hands clasped, and her eyes shining with what light there was in the hall. He started past her, saying — My father. .

— Still awaits you, she assented, eager. — Our Father. .

— Janet, he said getting by her, and smiling to her, to calm the great agitation which threatened, as she came after him close as could be without touching him, to break out in some more vehement expression of welcome, — yes, I have come back.

— Rabboni, they doubted, she said. — I did not.

— Yes, seeing you here, and… he faltered, — I… my father. . backing from her, — back…

— From the tomb! she whispered clear.

— Yes, it… in a way, he mumbled, reaching the door, — recovering from. . good God, I… He fumbled with the handle behind him; and she held off, reflecting the vigilant angles of woodwork beyond her.

— The. . reassuring feeling… he went on, figuring his hand in the air between them, — being home again. . though the scraping of the door obscured his words to her, — here, to feel myself again, here. .

— They will not know you.

— The reason I came back…

— Shall I tell them, it is you, come back?

The chill of outdoors embraced him from behind. — I… I… He commenced to shiver against it.

— Or will you tell them, in your own time? she asked with a step toward him.

— Yes, yes, he said, getting the door closed between them, and shutting her intensively submissive, conspiratory affirmation into the dim hall with her.

The scraps of cloud which the dawn had found out, drifting with no apparent purpose, met here and there now the sky was light. A delegation of them moved round to east, toward the sun; and others, darkly separate in the west, conspired together over Mount Lamentation, where he raised his eyes. It was the most prominent of an ascendance of rolling hills, drawn up against the only clear horizon; and that simply, it had been the horizon beyond which lay destiny. Again, the cold air stabbed with each breath. No matter the direction on a map, it was beyond Mount Lamentation Lapland lay, waiting for the Gospel. From one step to the next he dropped his weight, jarring, as his feet hit, restraining him down the hard slope toward the carriage barn; and remarkable here, as indoors, the distance a few steps covered, each one a familiar measurement of compulsion, but without the sense of motion, of the dash which this precipitous decline had once insisted down.

The Town Carpenter stood on his platform, with a slightly vacant but still expectant expression on his face. Much, perhaps, like good King Wenceslaus of Bohemia looking out on his still capital, prostrated before him by papal interdict, the Town Carpenter looked upon the town laid out here under the still cold, provoked by its sedulous silence; and here, as there, to the approach of the pale thin man in mean attire.

But however the shade of John Huss may have leaped here from beyond Lamentation to find itself animate, teeth a-datter, shoulders hunched forward, and even the hands thrust down seeking warmth in empty pockets colder against hard shivering limbs of the moving frame within the cloth: too hard, perhaps, and worse, too familiar, a prospect too mean for even that most mettlesome martyr, on such a cold day, ahead one expression effaced another (the Town Carpenter leaned back to spit off the platform), and Wenceslaus IV, "the vacillating," abdicated and was gone, and the shade of the martyr gone with him.

— Here, don't bark at him, by God don't you bark at him! the Town Carpenter shouted, as the dog leaped forward over a heap of bull dung, barking. — Don't pick her up, he went on, coming down from the platform. — She'll pee all over you. There now, he finished, and standing over his visitor he looked at him with frank and eager curiosity. — There now, he repeated, — that you look tired, it's not surprising to me. Here from Ethiopia and the three Indies.

— Ethiopia! Good God yes, I feel like I'd come that far.

The Town Carpenter's eyes glistened, as he listened and pretended to hear. — Sooner or later, of course, I knew you'd arrive, he said. — And are you alone? He bent close, intent for the nod he received. — I knew you would be, of course, he went on at that. — To voyage today with ten thousand knights, and one hundred thousand footmen, it might clutter things up.

Nevertheless, the Town Carpenter looked slightly disappointed.

— Being back, I… well, thank God I'm back.

The Town Carpenter watched him draw a hand across his chin, and smile. — Back, the Town Carpenter repeated, standing off to look above them at the sky, — when we get back, of course, we can take up such proper customs again. But here… he swept a hand out before him, — here, of course, they've no idea of a hero. I live surrounded by people who've no idea what a hero is. And do you know why? Why, because they've no idea of what they're doing themselves. None! Not an idea in this world or the next of what they're doing on God's green earth. Oh, it's a strange land you've come visiting to see me here. With no idea of a hero, you see, but they need them so badly that they make up special games, hitting a ball with a stick and all kinds of nonsense, and the men who win the games are their heroes. And then, he went on, warming to what was apparently a severe preoccupation of his, — when that gets stale, they arrange whole wars which have no more reason for existing than the people who fight in them, and a boy may become a hero fighting for a life that's worth something for the first time, threatened with loss of it, that or dying to save the lives of people who've no idea what to do with them. Fortunately, he went on, and inclined his head nearer, — there's a way out for most of them.