William Gaddis - The Recognitions

The wind was pursuing its career with extravagant glee, now it had one. The snow was driven to places which only this paranoid force could care to oppress so; though, to be striding forth in it was to assume the delusions of the storm itself, becoming the object of its hostility, and thus abruptly render a validifying dimension to this manic phase of a reality which would, left to itself, blow itself out in senselessness. Therefore, to redeem these absurd extravaganzas, which is after all the way of a hero, requires a worthy goal; then the gratuitous violence threatens only that path, and as the wind rises, the more worthy the goal then, and the more heroic the journey.

The Depot Tavern was presided over by the head of a twelve-point buck, whose look of resignation implied understanding of the fact that his antlers would never again be shed and renewed, a fate tempered by a festoon of Christmas tree bulbs which were, momentarily, seasonal, though he wore them with great forbearance whatever the solstice. Otium cum dignitate, the chipped lips posed up there, and with great dignity, considering his circumstances, the buck gazed down through dust-filmed eyeballs upon the present.

Just now this present was being cajoled toward a disfigurated future by a man with a woman tattooed on his left arm. She reposed there so long as he talked or listened; but when he interrupted to raise his glass, she was strangled. Though she had been suffering this treatment for many years, she bore it with the same surprise contorting her blue face whenever it was repeated; and when it was done, she returned to the same pose of unsuspecting tranquillity. (True, she was not entirely innocent: turned at another angle, and a portion of her covered up, she was capable of a pose which none who did not know her might have suspected from her placid countenance.) — The Resurrectionists! said he; and she was strangled.

— The Resurrectionists? What would it have to do with grave-robbers? It was the sermon on medicine made from mummies. Mummies ground up in a powder tor medicine, said a man as far from the weather as possible, at the far end of the bar.

— Not that any of you have ever heard one of his sermons, said a small man in the middle. — Relying on what your wives repeat to you.

— And you was there, I suppose, imperson?

— I was. It was the sermon in which the Swiss rooster is condemned to burn to death for laying an egg.

— Fourteen seventy-four. I know that one myself.

There was an air of grudging conspiracy over all this; and if voices rose in argument the overtones were slightly quelled, suggesting, as in any totalitarian society, walls with ears, the ubiquitous dictator long in residence hie, et ubique, disputing no passage, for He was going nowhere. — But that little man selling brushes. .

— A manic. .

— Manichee…

— He was sent here, but Reverend saved us from that. If good and evil was absolutes, we would all of us be Manichean heretics, says the Reverend. I was there, you see. If it wasn't for evil being a depraved qualification of good, says the Reverend, we should all be Manicheans like the little brush salesman.

— Selling unchristian brushes to honest people. .

— Ha! there you're wrong, for Manichees was Christian. For them, says the Reverend, the sun itself was the visible symbol of Christ.

— They was not.

— It was so. How could you have the sun. .

— They was not, and what's more. .

— Here is the sexton coming now, he was there.

— They was not, and what if he was, he goes to church and makes up his own sermon, and afterward he'll tell you such and such was the Reverend's sermon which nobody heard but himself. Like the sermon on the American Legion. . him, he's as deaf as that coconut.

Every head but the buck turned to see the door thrown open, shaking the plate of glass and the configuration between the men and the storm. The Town Carpenter entered, pursued by a distant peal of thunder. — That damned racket, he said, shutting it out.

— It's rare, that you have thunder with snow, said the small man in the middle, appeasing.

— May it roll away and take my curse with it, the Town Carpenter growled, arrived at the bar. He squared his shoulders, reared his head, and looked round him. — Now do you know, after the Great Deluge there was no God? Well, there was not. With the world wet for a hundred years, there was no thunder, and men went around with their heads up, alone and unafraid they went, like heroes should, you know. Then it all dried off and the atmosphere up there recovered. He paused to kick the snow from his feet against the bar; and the dog waited till that was done to lie at his feet. — And then that damned thunder started, and scared them all so much, looking up to see nothing, that they took the images of terror right out of their own minds and hung them up there in the empty space above their empty heads. He drank down his glass. — There now, he said, putting it empty on the bar, and he reared his head, as though the buck's were the only face he would countenance. — I have a very important visitor, finally he brought out.

— Tom Swift, it must be, the strangler muttered, watching the Town Carpenter narrowly.

— To see him, you might not guess at the hero he is. Of course I recognized him immediately.

— A strange fellow got off the morning train, said the man in the middle. — Neither hat nor coat. Oh, you never know, you never know. Drunk perhaps. You never know.

Stealthily, the Town Carpenter looked at these two, his expression one of cunning. It was a look with which they were all familiar; and for its astute divining quality (that and the subsequent logical parallel of his conversation) he was often accused of perfect hearing. — There now, he said, pulling a filled glass to him, — you'd be surprised to see him perhaps, a man waited on by seven kings at a time, sixty dukes and a count for every day in the year, so modest and quiet as him.

— That train come in from the city, said the small man with beer.

— I've seen them, city people in the country, said the strangler. — I know them, terrified when they see things move without ticking or smoking.

— A man who sits with twelve archbishops on his right hand and twenty bishops on his left.

— They live in cities where nothing grows. Did you know that? Nothing grows in the city. Even their minds they keep steam-heated. Their horizons are dirty windowsills.

— Drunk, perhaps. You never know.

— Whose chamberlain is a bishop and king, and his chief cook a king and an abbot, he couldn't stoop to taking such titles as those. — Do you know what happens to people in cities? I'll tell you what happens to people in cities. They lose the seasons, that's what happens. They lose the extremes, the winter and summer. They lose the means, the spring and the fall. They lose the beginning and end of the day, and nothing grows but their bank accounts. Life in the city is just all middle, nothing is born and nothing dies. Things appear, and things are killed, but nothing begins and nothing ends.

— His domains lay from the three Indies to the ruins of Babylon, from Farther India to the tower of Babel. That's the voyage we're going to make. Waited on hand and foot by kings, from his humble looks you wouldn't believe it, from his quiet ways you'd never know. Of course I knew him immediately.

— You don't get heroes out of the cities. A city man is spread out too much.

— If you've ever watched the ground for a mole, tried to follow the silent movement of the course of his burrow and nothing moves, nothing but separate blades of grass, each of them moving for no good reason, and then the ground moves, and moves again, why that's the kind of a face he has.