Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

Rann raised his hand and Sharpe nodded.

“Doesn’t a scientist have to imagine, or dream, as much as an artist does—perhaps more? Because he knows so definitely what he wants to achieve.”

“He knows,” Sharpe said, “and therefore his search among his dream materials is directed. But sometimes it is not. Sometimes his focus comes out of wonder. Wonder—then ask why! That’s a technique too—though a technician is not a pure scientist. Yes, I’d say a real artist and a pure scientist are related. Matter of fact, most top scientists are also musicians, painters, and so forth, as you will discover when you come to know them.”

“Can artists be scientists?” Rann asked.

Question and answer sped between them like lightning and thunder.

“Yes,” Sharpe said firmly. “Not basically in dream stuff, but artist imagination lays hold on any effect as material. Electronic sound produces a new kind of music, new color formations affect painters. The artist receives the new material, makes it his own, and through it expresses his reactions, his feelings.”

“I see a difference between scientists and artists,” Rann declared.

“Tell me,” Sharpe commanded.

“Scientists invent, discover, prove. Artists express. They don’t have to prove. If they are successful—”

“That is, if they communicate—,” Sharpe interpolated.

“Yes,” Rann said.

“Right,” Sharpe replied. “You and I must talk about this further. Stay after class a moment.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Class dismissed.”

To Rann, lingering at his desk, he said almost abruptly, “I have a committee meeting tonight. Come over tomorrow night about eight. If you have your theme finished, bring it to me.”

“Yes, Dr. Sharpe,” Rann said.

For a reason he could not explain he felt almost rebuffed, and he went away puzzled to the point, almost, of wound.

“YOU’RE NOT EATING,” HIS MOTHER said.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “I’ve never known you not to be hungry. Do you feel sick?”

“No,” he said.

“Has something happened today?”

“I went to my classes as usual, but I have a theme to write tonight. I keep thinking about it.”

“What’s it about?”

Her persistence drove him near to anger. “I don’t know yet.”

“What class is it for?”

“Psychology II.”

“That’s Dr. Sharpe.”

“Yes.”

She reflected briefly. “There’s something about that man I don’t like.”

“Perhaps you don’t know him well enough.”

“He wasn’t a special friend of your father’s.”

“Were they not friends?”

“I don’t remember that I ever heard him speak of Donald Sharpe.”

“They weren’t in the same department.”

“That’s another thing. It would have pleased your father if you’d chosen his department—English.”

“Father always wanted me to choose for myself.”

He tried to keep irritation out of his voice, for he loved his mother in the depths of his being. On the surface of his life, his daily life in this house that he had shared with her as long ago as he could remember, she was beginning to irritate him in ways that made him ashamed and puzzled. He had always loved her wholeheartedly and simply with childhood love. Now his love was tinged with a sense of repulsion that was almost physical. He did not like to know that he had been formed in her womb, from whence he had emerged red with her blood. Especially he hated to hear her advocate breast-feeding when she spoke with young faculty wives in pregnancy.

“I nursed my baby,” she would declare.

It sickened him to think of himself ever as a baby sucking at her full breasts, and that she was in fact a very pretty woman, her smooth fair hair scarcely gray, and blue eyes gentle, and her features finely cut, the mouth especially soft and tender. Her very prettiness added to his conflict about her. It seemed unnecessary, even unwise, for a mother to be so pretty that other people remarked on it, and since his father’s death, especially, that men liked to talk with her, young or old they liked her, and this roused in him a cold sort of jealousy, for his father’s sake.

In his instant and unavoidable imagination he saw the process of himself feeding at her breast, and tried not to see it. It had become disgusting to him. He wished that he could have been born in some other way and independently, out of the air, or chemically in a laboratory. As yet he was not attracted to women, and he avoided the memory of Ruthie’s rosy organs, though sometimes, to his surprise, he dreamed of her, although he had not seen her for years, nor Chris, either.

Such facts he put away as he sat at his desk in his own room before his typewriter. His subject, which he wrote in careful capitals, was INVENTORS AND POETS.

“The dreams of poets,” he began, “led to the inventions of scientists. A poet imagines himself in the body of a bird. What is it like to fly above the treetops, what is it like to soar in the sky? If he is only a poet, then he only dreams. But if he longs to make his dream come true, he imagines himself flying somehow just as he is, a man without wings. Yet wings, it is obvious, he must have if he is ever to fly and so he must manufacture wings. He must make a machine which will lift him from the earth. He dreams again but now of such a machine, and with his hands, guided by his dream, he tries until he succeeds in making an airplane. It may not be the same man who finishes the making of the machine. Many men worked on aircraft before one was successful, and the dream itself was as old as Icarus. But the dream came first. Dreamer and inventor both are necessary. They are the creators, the one of the dream, the other of its concrete and final form.”

The thoughts poured into his brain, and his fingers flew to put them down. When the pages were finished—twenty pages, more than he had ever written before—it was midnight. He heard his mother pause at the door, but she did not open the door or even call. She merely paused; he thought he heard her sigh and then she went away. He was growing beyond her direction and she knew it. But then, so did he, and thinking about it as he made ready for bed, he became aware that he might feel lonely, thus separating himself from her as inevitably he must if he were to grow to be himself, except that he had a friend, a guiding friend, a man, Donald Sharpe. Tomorrow he would see him again. He would get up early and correct his theme and without copying it over, he would hand it in. And Donald Sharpe, his friend, his teacher, would say, “Come around this evening, and we’ll talk about it.”

He went to bed and was sleepless in a certain excitement.

“I SHAN’T CRITICIZE THIS, RANN,” Sharpe said, ruffling the sheets of closely written paper.

“I want you to criticize,” Rann said.

He was aware of Sharpe’s powerful charm, resisted it and then succumbed to it. It was a combination he felt helpless to resist, an aura of the spirit, a scintillating intelligence shining through the dark eyes, a physical presence of attraction. He felt a strange new longing to touch Sharpe’s hands, almost too perfectly shaped for a man’s hands, the skin fine grained and smooth like the skin on his face, the bone structure sculptured and delicate in spite of size.

Sharpe glanced at him over the pages and flushed as his eyes met the boy’s fascinated gaze. He put the papers on the small table beside his chair.

“What are you thinking, Rann?” he asked softly.

“I am thinking about you, sir,” Rann said. He spoke in a daze of feeling that he could not comprehend.

“What about me?” Sharpe asked in the same gentle voice.