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I shall be here, he thought, after them all. It’s my nature to take in inspiration, and upon that thought, he suffered such a narrowing of the heart, such an apprehension that he stopped in his tracks there in the stairwell and leaned against the pebbled wall, thinking a moment and cold with fright. An art which was necessarily dependent on inspiration arriving from external forces was—perhaps enslaved to those forces; and if it was, then he was. Keye could be right. It shook the assumption of a lifetime and demanded thinking.
He wandered out then, through the foyer and onto the street where the white electric glare lit small black figures against the white stone and the cranes wheezed and lifted their burdens like grotesque giants. He saw yet another course of stone going into place as a view which had been open in Kierkegaard all the years of his residence here became forever obstructed, imprisoned, cut off.
He built a snare for the eye; he did things until now unthought of; he discovered unconsidered and unfelt dimensions to his own work which verged on the chaotic.
An irrational force, a madness, a dark and Dionysian force. That was his work, which begun, acquired its own momentum which seized minds and impressed them with its own Reality.
Kierkegaard changed. It was begun. Keye and Waden had no power against it.
He laughed as he had laughed the su
But Waden Jenks had permitted the work, urged it.
The perplexities overcame him. He had interrupted the workers with his laughter, and now with his silence, They stood there, surely wondering who was there in the shadows. But then they began work again, no one investigating. There were madmen in Kierkegaard, the invisibles, who sometimes with sound or action intruded on the Reality of the city—who screamed, sometimes, or laughed, as if they made some attempt to be seen by the sane. Herrin drew breath, and walked quietly away from Keye’s apartment building and through the peripheries of the work.
“Sir,” apprentices murmured, recognizing him now, and offering him respect. He walked on, paying no attention to them, casting instead a critical eye to the stone which gleamed white in the darkness, sheened with the artificial lamps. No flaws were evident.
“Sir,” said Leona Pace, who came to intercept him. “I thought you’d gone.”
“Going,” he said equably, and walked on.
He refused to be disturbed. The physical fact of the sculpture reassured him that all Keye’s hopes to manipulate him and all Waden’s confidence that he did so ... were the necessary illusions of Keye Ly
He walked ... up the long extent of Main, through the narrow archway in the firebush hedge, onto Port Street, intending to go to the studio in the University, to apply his restlessness to his labors ... but the Residency was before him and he stopped, stared up at the bleak pebblestone façade which was identical to that of the University, or a warehouse, or anything else.
This, too, I shall change, he thought, conceiving further ambitions, wondering which was the more important, to involve himself immediately in the Residency alterations or to intervene in the proposed new hemisphere programs.
MAN, said the plaque inset above the Residency entry, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.
And he smiled, knowing how that was set forth to the masses of Freedom, and what the real truth was, for in University they taught another maxim: The strongest survives, the weaker serve, the weakest perish.
Who am I?the masses in the provincial schools were taught to ask.
The masses went on asking, diverted by the question and never really wanting the answer if they had known it. The sign was for them. They took pride in it. They saw the world in their own measure.
The Students at University learned a second question. What is reality?They doubted all previous questions.
And a very few attained to the Last Statement.
I.
He smiled somewhat cruelly at the sign, which to the masses promised control of their destinies.
Perhaps the mad, he thought, have seen their conditions. Inferiority was a bitter mouthful. The mad in Kierkegaard were one step ahead of the sane and subservient ... because most of those out there limited their thoughts—lest they see what the mad had seen, that they were not in control of anything.
Must not think further—or go mad, lacking power, which, after all, makes life worth living.
And is there one, he wondered (the inevitable question), only one man, after all, for whom the whole species exists? But humanity had no existence, of course, save in the mind of the one man who warped all that was about himself.
Himself.
He was, after all, very comfortable this night. He had simply recovered his previous state, before Keye, which was solitude. He thought of the first night he had begun to realize his solitude, the first night he had begun to conceive of himself as psychurgosand not as child, the night the visitor had come to tell him he was different.
His parents. Perrin. In fact his thoughts had not tended that way twice in a day in a very long time. He would bring them to Kierkegaard when his great work was finished. They would be an excellent test of it. The anticipation of the effect on them excited him.
Accomplishment, he thought, did not diminish goals: it opened new ones. To reach back to Camus and to alter that place too ... one of his apprentices, trained by the work here, would suffice to change Camus. And to change his parents’ and sister’s lives, by enveloping them in his influence, giving them prominence in Camus. ...
He smiled, self-pleased, confident, and walked from the facade of the Residency and its power and its philosophy toward his own domain at the University. He never meant to let Waden come too close to him, as Keye had come, until she tried to maneuver him and discovered that she could not.
He whistled, walking along the walk beneath the streetlamps, disturbing the night because it was his to disturb.
A shadow confronted him, gangling, robed. He sawit because it startled him, coming out of that patch of shadow between the two buildings. Or perhaps it had been there all along and he had not perceived it. He had truly not seen one of the Others in—he had forgotten how long. He had learned how not to see them, out of politeness.
It stood there, a blob of midnight in the light of the street-lamp, and from within the hood seemed to stare at him, a question posed. His path was blocked. The ahnit made himself ... itself? inconvenient to his progress.
He walked round it and curiously—for he was beyond such curiosity—he had a nagging impulse to look back, to see if it regarded his departing back, or if he should see it taking its own way.
Anathema.
It did not exist. He refused it existence. An inevitable question occurred to him, regarding his existence in its eyes.
His mind rebounded perversely to his analysis of the insane, who confronted a reality which swallowed them, and who thereafter, had to ignore all realities, or establish their own rules.