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

memory of that surprising transformation was strong, and it was no doubt true that all the sophistication in the world could not rid the soul of its primal faith in magic. Even now, in his hopelessness and guilt, he could not deny that his knowledge of the house around him, restored by his hands to something like its former beauty, miraculously cleaned up like the world of Noah, gave a kind of security, however tentative; a place to stand. That was how his father had lived his whole life: rebuilding, letting the light in. He, not Nietzsche’s Prussian officer—much less the artist, philosopher, or saint—was the Übermensch.

He saw in his mind poor sickly Nietzsche, dreaming on one of his long, solitary mountain walks, pausing to lean his stick against a rock and scribble more notes to himself—yellow-eyed and bent with thought (always nauseous, changing to new diets), looking up, rapt and envious, at his vision of the beefy, brainless hero he could never be and partly hated, the Prussian officer with his fine moustache and fat white horse, too stupid and arrogantly sure of himself to put two thoughts together or even mind his inability, beaming with joy of life, prancing his horse through the high, frail flowerbeds of mountain-dwelling peasants, expressing without even knowing it his Will-to-Power. “Ah yes!” cries the hunchback in black, his thin Protestant smile atwitch, all complexity falling for the moment out of his head. This, the mighty Prussian officer, was life, this witless, jubilant golden lion; and he, Nietzsche, with his ghastly stomachaches, headaches, and chills, his complicated worries about the opinions of Kant and Martin Luther—Nietzsche with his fevers and lost-sinner anxieties and congenital shortness of breath—was Life’s enemy and failure, humiliation. He shakes a yellow bony finger and cries, dancing on spindly legs, “God dies of pity, made ill through the suffering with which He has too much empathized! To demand pity of the strong is to demand that they become weak!” He smiles, rolls his eyes, shakes out a second yellow finger. His baggy black pants and black coattails flap in the wind. “And in the second place, or possibly the third”—he has lost count and, in his abject love for the Prussian officer, is resolved not to care—“to elevate compassion to society’s first principle is to deny the Will-to-Life: in fact, to will Death!” He begins to walk in a tight little circle, hands clasped behind his back, head thrown forward like a duck’s. Bony-white. “Life itself is essentially, not incidentally, appropriation, injury, the overpowering of the alien and weak. Life is oppression, hard-heartedness, the imposition of form, one’s own form. This is why the world gets worse and worse. Mankind, like every other type of animal, produces a surplus of the abortive, diseased, degenerate, feeble, and necessarily suffering. This is why ‘spirit’ steals the march on the pure blind and purblind activity of the Prussian officer—‘spirit,’ by which I mean ‘caution, patience, cunning, dissembling, masterful self-control, and whatever is cheap, false mimicry of life.’ ” He falls to his knees as if struck by a lightning bolt or the accidental backlash of the officer’s merry whip. “I’m a slave, that’s my secret. The well-born officer feels himself happy. He has no need to construct his happiness artificially, by glancing at his enemies and then, as we men of resentment are obliged to do, persuading himself, lying to himself, saying to himself, as we lesser men do, that he’s better off, at least, than Herr So-and-So. Slave morality thrives on external stimuli: its action is, through and through, reaction. The officer requires no external reality: he is therefore, himself, the Worldl” All a metaphor, granted, for his true supermen, the philosopher, the poet, and the saint. But what a metaphor!

Yet there were indeed supermen; men who, like Mickelsson’s father, had given up thought long ago: men who simply acted—not out of pity but with infallible faith and love: in the way (not an exclusive way) of—at their best—the Christians Nietzsche denied the existence of, except for that first sweet idiot Christian on the cross.

Then the dark thought crossed his mind that it had been for his mother that Mickelsson’s father had worked on the house, room after room—painting and wallpapering, changing walls around, refashioning doors and windows; and now the house stood empty, discoloring and sagging on its hill, his mother living in one room, a guest of relatives. While Mickelsson, for the sake of no one, fixed up this house.

He shied from the thought; then, catching himself, closing his fists, returned to it. Perhaps he should bring his mother here to live with him. (He remembered her sitting in the livingroom of the big old house in Wisconsin, reading or writing letters, sometimes looking up with a start when the clock struck, saying to herself, like one brought out of eternity for a moment into time, “Well!”—not with disapproval, simply registering time’s existence before leaving it again. The wardrobe top was filled with pictures of family and friends. On the top of the spindly mahogany desk where she wrote, filling the stationery’s center space then filling up the margins, or on the stand beside the overstuffed chair in which she read her Thoughts for Today or The Upper Room, there would be flowers from her garden in a pressed-glass vase.) It had not been possible, when he was still with Ellen, to ask his mother to come live with him; but he could do it now. Why not? It was true that she tired and annoyed him a little, telling and retelling the same old stories, dwelling endlessly on what seemed to him trivia—what the mailman had said, how repairs on the local church organ had come to less than the estimate, how the Pedersens’ dog had a rare disease and the Pedersens had not yet told the children. But it was true too that she was a comfort to him. In his mother’s presence he found all the