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When we finish our hour with Frater Antony we go back to the fields. We pull weeds, spread fertilizer — it’s all organic, naturally — and plant seedlings. Here Oliver is at his best. He’s always tried to repudiate his farm-boy upbringing, but now suddenly he’s flaunting it, the way Eli flaunts his Yiddish vocabulary despite not having been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah. The more-ethnic-than-thou syndrome, and Oliver’s ethnos is rural-agricultural, so he goes at his hoeing and spading with formidable vim. The fraters try to slow him down: I think his energy appalls them, but also they worry about his chances of heatstroke; Frater Leon, the physician-frater, has spoken to Oliver several times, pointing out that the midmorning temperatures are in the low nineties and will soon be much higher than that. Still Oliver chugs furiously on. I find all this grubbing in the soil agreeably strange and strangely agreeable, myself. It appeals to the back-to-nature romanticism that I suppose lurks in the hearts of all excessively urbanized intellectuals. I’ve never done any manual labor more strenuous than masturbation before this, so the field chores are back-breaking as well as mindblowing for me, but I haul myself eagerly through the work. So far. Eli’s relationship to the farm stuff is very similar to mine, though if anything more intense, more romantic; he talks about drawing physical renewal from Mother Earth. And Timothy, who of course had never had to do so much as tie his own shoelaces, takes a lordly gentleman fa
By ten or half past ten in the morning it becomes unpleasantly hot, and we leave the fields, all except three farmer-fraters whose, names I do not yet know. They spend ten or twelve hours outdoors each day: as a penance, perhaps? The rest of us, both fraters and the Receptacle, go to our rooms and bathe again. Then we four convene over in the far wing for our daily session with Frater Miklos, the history-frater.
Miklos is a compact, powerfully built little man, with forearms like thighs and thighs like logs. He gives the impression of being older than the other fraters, though I admit there’s something paradoxical about applying a comparative like “older” to a group of ageless men. He speaks with a faint and indefinable accent, and his thought processes are distinctly nonlinear: he rambles, he wanders, he slides unexpectedly from theme to theme. I believe it’s deliberate, that his mind is subtle and unfathomable rather than senile and undisciplined. Perhaps over the centuries he’s grown bored with mere consecutive discourse; I know I would.
He has two subjects: the origin and development of the Brotherhood and the history of the concept of human longevity. On the first of these he is at his most elusive, as if determined never to give us a straightforward outline. We are very old, he keeps saying, very old, very old, and I have no way of knowing whether he means the fraters or the Brotherhood itself, though I think perhaps both; perhaps some of the fraters have been in it from the begi