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

There was nothing he could do about it. (Now as he walked he was slamming his right fist into his left hand.) Story of his life. Wrapped up in himself, as if his once relatively solid flesh and vaulting ambition (will to power) were his winding sheet, he’d managed to sleep through his ex-wife’s whole existence. (He thought of how taken by surprise he’d been, noticing her beauty in the snapshot he’d found, made when Uncle Edgar had come to California.) No doubt he’d missed his children’s existence, too. It was the same thing he’d sensed repeatedly in his teaching, failing to hear what his students had to say because he was waiting to get on with the course. It was that that had kept him from understanding, possibly saving, Michael Nugent.

He frowned, stopping himself. Sentimentality was the great risk for the man cut off from others and himself. It was sentimentality that made a fool of the hermit in the woods. Flip side of fascism, as Jung had pointed out. He must beware! He covered his eyes with his hand. He felt a little feverish. His mind kept rushing, driving.

The last time he’d seen Nugent, down at the office, just as he was packing up his books and papers to leave after a long day of classes and appointments—a day now declining into darkness, yellow lights coming across the dark snowy lawn from the Chemistry Building and classroom wing—Nugent had seemed happy; there had been a flush of color in his cheeks. How little one ever really knew about what was going on in others! Nugent had talked excitedly about some vision that had come to him one night when he was sitting alone, depressed, in his dormitory room. It had been raining (now Mickelsson found some of it coming back), and Nugent had been seated beside his window, a book of Wittgenstein’s open in his lap. He’d been so sunk in wretchedness—the sense of loss and futility that always came when he thought about the deaths he’d been through this year (his father, whom he rarely saw—Nugent’s parents were divorced—the father killed in an electrical accident at Niagara Mohawk, where he worked; and then Nugent’s teacher, Professor Warren), he—Nugent—had been unable to read, had neither the will nor the eyesight, because tears were streaming down his cheeks. Then something almost miraculous had happened, he said; something eerily related to what he’d been reading. He’d looked with his teary eyes at the dark, rainwashed window and had seen, scattered as if not on the windowpane but in the night beyond, thousands of blurry droplets, all glowing with color, every color of the rainbow. He wiped his eyes, startled by the beauty of it, and when he looked again he saw a different vision, equally beautiful: sharp, distinct waterdrops, each with a tiny pinprick glow of color. He had closed his eyes then, wondering at the sensation of warmth and peace that had suddenly welled up in him, and into his mind had come the idea he had dropped in on Mickelsson to talk about, the idea of a universe of infinitely precious glowing particles, every one of them necessarily against every other, that was the tragic law of individuation in space and time, but each and every one lit up by the ruby, emerald, sapphire, and diamond shine of God’s consciousness.

Mickelsson, of course, had had nothing to say. It was not a philosophical insight, only mystical—conatively persuasive but cognitively meaningless—and what it had to do with the feeling of peace that had swept through Nugent and seemed not to have left him yet, heaven only knew. Apparently it had left him, sometime afterward. Perhaps its leaving had been for Nugent the final blow. Tranquillity recollected in emotion. No telling now, of course, except if one day he should come across the black boy who was Nugent’s friend. And what would they say? A loud crack came from the pipestem and Mickelsson awakened to the fact that, in his anger and frustration, he’d been biting down hard.

While he fixed and ate supper, carelessly, almost reluctantly—the grocery bags still out on the counter; he must remember to put them away in the fridge—he listened to Beethoven symphonies one after another on the stereo, learning nothing, his brain grown numb. His back began to ache, an effect of a muscular tension he hadn’t been aware of. He imagined Donnie Matthews, riding on a train somewhere, looking out with frightened eyes.

Close as the stereo was to the kitchen—the speakers were just inside the livingroom door—he felt as if he were listening to something far away, increasingly far away—maybe Donnie’s train plummeting into darkness—as if the music were coming from somewhere deep in the interstices of things, perhaps from himself, not that the music became clearer to him now: the cypher remained as inscrutable as ever. He felt himself more and more one with it, and yet, paradoxically, removed from himself, as if he were vanishing. (There was something about that in Ortega y Gasset.) He was in a state almost trancelike; indeed, perhaps he was in a trance, as when one sits in a chair and by self-hypnosis raises one’s arm, telling oneself with full conviction that the arm will rise, though one will not consciously raise it. He had a sense that by a head-shake he could pull out of this state, but by the faintest flicker of choice he allowed it to continue. The lines and colors of the kitchen became sharper, cleaner, as if brute existents were springing to life. His thought was dreamy and confused. He could not have explained, if someone had asked him, the distinction between himself and the walls of the room, the sudden swell of horns and violins.

When he went in to change the record at the end of the Sixth Symphony, he saw the old woman standing at