John Fowles - The Magus

5. Mr. von Masoch sat on a pin;

Then sat again, to push it in.

“ How exquisite,” cried Plato,

“ The idea of a baked potato.”

But exquisiter to some

Is potato in the tum.

“ My dear, you must often be frightened,”

Said a friend to Madame de Sade.

“ Oh not exactly frightened,

But just a little bit scarred.”

Give me my cardigan,

Let me think hardigan.

This was evidently a game between the sisters; alternate different handwritings.

6. Mystery enough at noon.

The blinding unfrequented paths

Above the too frequented sea

Hold labyrinth and mask enough.

No need to twist beneath the moon

Or multiply the midnight rite.

Here on the rising secret cliff

In this white fury of the light

Is mystery enough at noon.

The last three sheets had a fairy story on them.

THE PRINCE AND THE MAGICIAN

Once upon a time there was a young prince, who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.

But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.

“ Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.

“ Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.

“ And those strange and troubling creatures?”

“ They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”

“ Then God also must exist!” cried the prince.

“ I am God,” replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.

The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.

“ So you are back,” said his father, the king.

“ I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.

The king was unmoved.

“ Neither real islands, nor neat princesses, nor a real God, exist.”

“ I saw them!”

“ Tell me how God was dressed.”

“ God was in full evening dress.”

“ Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”

The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.

“ That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”

At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.

“ My father the king has told me who you are,” said the young prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”

The man on the shore smiled.

“ It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”

The prince returned pensively home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.

“ Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”

The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.

“ Yes, my son, I am only a magician.”

“ Then the man on the shore was God.”

“ The man on the shore was another magician.”

“ I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.”

“ There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.

The prince was full of sadness.

He said, “I will kill myself.”

The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.

“ Very well,” he said. “I can bear it.”

“ You see, my son,” said the king, “you too now begin to be a magician.”

The “orders” looked as if they had all been typed out at the same time, just as the poems were all scribbled in the same pencil with the same pressure, as if they had been written ad hoc in one sitting. Nor did I believe such “orders” could ever have been sent; what else was the telephone for? I puzzled over Hirondelle… still tender ; must not be mentioned to me; some surprise, some episode I was never shown. The poems and the little epistemological fable were easier to understand; had clear applications. Obviously they could not have been sure that I would break into the Earth. Perhaps there were such clues littered all over the place, it being accepted on their side that I would find only a very small proportion of them. But what I did find would come to me in a different way from the blatantly planted clue—with more conviction; and yet might be as misleading as all the other clues I had been given.

I was wasting my time at Bourani; all I might appear to find there would confuse confusion.

That was the meaning of the fable. By searching so fanatically I was making a detective story out of the summer’s events, and to view life as a detective story, as something that could be deduced, hunted and arrested, was no more realistic (let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least.

On Moutsa, at that first sight of the party, I had felt, in spite of everything, a shock of excitement; and an equally revealing disappointment when I realized they were nothing: mere tourists. Perhaps that was my deepest resentment of all against Conchis. Not that he had done what he did, but that he had stopped doing it .

I had intended to break into the house as well, to wreak some kind of revenge there. But suddenly that seemed petty and mean; and insufficient; because it was not that I still did not intend to have my revenge. Only now I saw quite clearly how I would have it. The school could dismiss me. But nothing could prevent my coming to the island the following summer. And then we would see who had the last laugh.

I got up and left the Earth, and went to the house; walked one last time under the colonnade. The chairs were gone, even the bell. In the vegetable garden the cucumber plants lay yellowed and dying; the Priapus had been removed.

I was full of a multiple sadness, for the past, for the present, for the future. Even then I was not waiting only to say, to feel, goodbye, but fractionally in the hope that a figure might appear. I did not know what I would have done if one did, any more than I knew what I was going to do when I got to Athens. If I wanted to live in England; what I wanted to do. I was in the same state as when I came down from Oxford. I only knew what I didn’t want to do; and all I had gained, in the matter of choosing a career, was a violent determination never again to be a teacher of any sort. I’d empty dustbiris rather than that.

An emotional desert lay in front of me, an inability ever to fall in love again that was compounded of the virtual death of Lily and the actual death of Alison. I was disintoxicated of Lily; but my disappointment at failing to match her had become in part a disappointment at my own character; an unwanted yet inevitable feeling that she would vitiate or haunt any relationship I might form with another woman; stand as a ghost behind every lack of taste, every stupidity. Only Alison could have exorcized her. I remembered those moments of relief at Monemvasia and on the ship coming back to Phraxos, moments when the most ordinary things seemed beautiful and lovable—possessors of a magnificent quotidaneity. I could have found that in Alison. Her special genius, or uniqueness, was her normality, her reality, her predictability; her crystal core of nonbetrayal; her attachment to all that Lily was not.