Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

“You’re an optimist, Jessie.”

“Do you honestly believe …” she began, then let it trail off. “Well,” she said, and after a few seconds, with a laugh, “Thanks for cheering me up.”

It was evident that his gloom had infected her, his spirit reaching out, as Nugent’s had done, filling her house with shadows.

“Well, I better let you go, kiddo,” she said.

“OK. It was good to talk to you, Jessie. Sorry I haven’t been more fun. If there’s anything at all I can do for you—”

“I’ll keep it in mind. Bye, Pete.”

“Good-bye, Jess. Keep the ole chin up!”

The dialtone came.

His gloom hung on for hours, like the cabbage smell in the hallway outside Donnie’s apartment. Not even weight-lifting could free him of it. If he were Nietzsche, he thought, he would write some malicious, sarcastic tract—against “Faith” in Martin Luther, for instance: an incapacity for Christian works—a personal fact shrouded by an extreme mistrust whether every kind of action is not altogether sin and from the Devil. That was Mickelsson’s situation, of course—not to mention Nietzsche’s, though Nietzsche had shrouded it in clowning and rant. It was the situation of the modern world, announced by Nietzsche’s hammer resounding on the door of the emptied church. Bullshit rhetoric. Good-bye! Keep the ole chin up! No doubt Dr. Martinus had secretly suspected it, that not only his enemies’ opinions were “donkey fart,” but his own ravings about the world as shit were of the world. Had begun to suspect the truth within fifteen seconds of the famous lightning bolt that nearly burned his cock off (so he’d joked) and startled from his lips the vow that if God would spare him he’d sign up as a monk. Certainly must have suspected it later, gouty, with coarse features—“trying to lend them a suffering and tender expression,” a not too friendly visitor wrote—or in his own words “gross, fat, gray, green, overworked, overloaded, overwhelmed. …” With good-peasant honesty had paid for the secret fear that all he maintained might be bullshit by ladling scatology into everything he said, more foul than the devils who threw their bedpans at the doctor, as he threw his at them, or so he claimed; more foul-mouthed than mad, tortured Jonathan Swift—and foul-mouthed even before he’d been struck by kidney disease, when he was driven insane by (as was fitting) his own piss. A man of profound depressions, and for reason enough: Machiavellian, steeped in all seven deadly sins, even a rather peculiar twist of lechery, arranging with his friend that they screw their wives at the same time and think of one another; even in the noblest causes a liar and, like Nietzsche, buffoon: “Not only children, but also great lords, are best beguiled into truth, in their own best interest, by conveying it to them through foolishness. Fools are tolerated and listened to by those who cannot suffer the truth from a wise man.” Always in action, a veritable dynamite keg of will—he’d scribbled and scribbled, volume after volume—though unable to justify works of any kind. … Lover and lute-player, small flashing eyes, thick crooked lips, Renaissance roué composing tunes for his heavenly sweetheart—and battling with Kate about a husband’s right to take mistresses. The filthiest, basest of swine, in short, whatever his genius—as Mickelsson’s grandfather would admit, wincing. Much to the old man’s credit. He was the only practicing Lutheran Mickelsson had ever met who would admit the truth about the founder. The old man had said (it was a family legend: the only near-joke he’d ever been heard to utter), “Think what he’d have been if he hadn’t been kept busy with all those books!”

The fact remained: action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew that every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source, as if by uremia? Luther had an out: he could claim that in whatever good he did he was the instrument of God, and in the rest the tool of devils. And Nietzsche, turning with all the rage of his brilliant, ferocious mind against Luther, had a hiding place: though his works might be filth, all malice and satire, his devil-dance and chittering pointed the way, by ironic contrast, to something nobler: the serene, spiritually mighty Übermensch. But it was a long time now since the announcement of that as yet unfulfilled possibility.

Perhaps not quite unfulfilled. One might point to Mickelsson’s old teacher McPherson, or to the supermen of science, like Einstein, who had claimed that he’d perceived as a young man the vanity of hope and striving. “I also perceived the cruelty of such effort, which hypocrisy and glittering words concealed more carefully in those days than they do now.” And so had turned first to conventional religion, which had failed to withstand his “youthfully critical scrutiny,” then had fled to a surer harmonious sphere, “that beautiful order glimpsed by Kepler, Galileo, Newton. …” The trick had worked better for McPherson than for Einstein, apparently. But say it was true that devotion to some mighty realm of thought meant escape from the vanity of hope and striving. What switch turned on the gift for caring about the possibly beautiful structure of the universe? Or for that matter the left horn of the dung beetle? He, Mickelsson, had been through all that: had written books that were sound and original, books that had been scorned and misunderstood, and had learned that, in a sense, the lack of reward didn’t matter much. It was the practice that mattered. MacIntyre’s word. In the practice of philosophy, as in the practice of law, or novel-writing, or almost anything else, one gained things inexpressible to anyone not in the practice; no harm that what you gained would die with you, to be regained, inexpressibly, by someone else. But when one day all interest in that casual gaining dried up,