Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

”Veni, Creator Spiritus,

Mentes tuorum visita,

Impie superna, gratia,

Quae tu creasti, pectora. .”

The official report was filed of fact-finding, documents’ inquiry, and the medical investigation performed within the limits of the state, with several questions, stemming from the lack of information of the papers supplied, unsatisfactorily answered. The palazzo was locked and boarded up. The deceased’s clothing, including a black coat faded and soiled and ripped more or less at intervals of its seams, was burned. A pen, a watch, and a suitcase of papers were confiscated by the proper authorities, while the black tin box containing a large manuscript was suborned by the doctor, in the stead of due fee, with a view to adding a penny to his competence.

There alone was epitaph.

There was nothing more: only the transfiguration of a soul, in memory remembered, lying buried in the ink that writes. But memory had its birthplace in those words, not the other way round, for creation is to memory what resurrection is to death, reversing pain to send it back again to ask of the momentarily incomplete idiom of that which prompted it — that feeble analogue, called reality, overflowing itself in every direction — what is meant in the terrible paradox at the heart of that truth which has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other: loving and hating. The question stops on the threshold of what cannot be investigated. It can only be felt; felt, then faced; and so faced, redeemed in the work of art that, taking the hint nature suspended, proceeds to detach itself from, and then maintain, the past against the influence of the present, which is only another approach to immortality — to make an image out of the force with which one has struggled to survive where finally one, transformed, has been created by what has been endured and mastered in the past, the fashioning of an incomprehensible beauty that slowly but finally emerges from the endless ceremonials of sadness. The confusions, misunderstandings, and mistakes, wafered on your forehead, will never disappear. One perishes from cold, kneeling for illumination outside the bed, in order to give life to the artifice of prayer.

But the survival is in the art — for there the heart begins to measure itself, not by its constraints but by its fullness, its poor baffled hopes dim now in the light of those infinite longings which spread over it, soft and holy as day-dawn. Thus it must be while the world lasts, the very misprisions against the spirit coming only to test and reveal the power of exaltation. Sorrow is the cause of immortal conceptions.

West Barnstable, Mass.

1978

Alexander Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts. A professor of English Literature, currently writer-in-residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, he has taught at the University of Virginia and at Harvard. Dr. Theroux is the author of essays, short stories, poetry, plays, children’s books, and novels. His portrait of Darconville appears on the jacket of this book.