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

its companion in damnation, the brother who’d failed life, loved too feebly, whom the old woman hated and meant to kill. Again and again. Kill until at last it dawned on her—as perhaps it had almost done when she’d reached toward Mickelsson—that there were others deserving of her rage.

Later, Mickelsson could not remember lying back down. Perhaps the old woman’s visit was also a dream.

He found Wittgenstein on his mind, another of Nietzsche’s children. Why was it that his thought kept turning, lately, to Wittgenstein, in whom he’d never felt any interest? It was almost as if someone else kept bringing him up. Wittgenstein with his desiccate world of facts, not things, his propositions, empirical “states of affairs,” his later “language games,” but throughout it all his stubborn insistence that anything beyond the limits of mathematics or articulate thought, anything in the province of his utterly mysterious God, must be consigned to silence.

Random lines from the Tractatus came to him, dredged up from heaven knew where—with heaven knew what inaccuracy or disjointedness. He let them come as they would, his brain leaden. It occurred to him—he did not dwell on it—that somewhere in his thought, a darker place in the surrounding darkness, the form of Geoffrey Tillson sat, un-moving, patiently waiting, like someone arrived ahead of time at a funeral.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did, it would have no value.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.

What makes it not-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.

And so it is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no end.

God does not reveal himself in the world.

Again he had the strong sense that someone was in the room with him—had perhaps been sitting very quiet, watching him, for some time. It was not the old woman; there was no trace of her crackling anger. After a moment’s thought he was sure it was not the old man either. He listened, hardly breathing, but whoever it was—if it was anyone—made no sound. (Luther’s advice: “When the devil comes at night to worry me, this is what I say: ‘Devil, I have to sleep now. That is God’s commandment, for us to work by day and sleep by night.’ If he keeps on nagging me and trots out my sins, then I answer: ‘Sweet devil, I know the whole list. Also write on it that I have shit in my breeches. …’ ”) Mickelsson stirred himself, raising both hands from under the covers to rub his face and eyes, bring feeling back. How strange, he thought, that he reasoned soberly on whom it might be when he knew perfectly well that it couldn’t be anyone. He was far gone, then. It was curious that a man could go mad and watch the whole process like a scientist. When it reached its extreme and, as he’d done before, he dressed himself up in outrageous attire and committed some oddity, talking to dead animals in the middle of a street, and he was dragged to some hospital and brought to his senses again, would the whole experience be flown from his head? How could thoughts so lucid fall out of reality entirely, like the popular songs and dance-steps of ancient Rome?

If he went mad, would the murder of the fat man be excused? That was not at all what he wanted.

After Mickelsson had left his wife, his daughter had cried for three days and nights, almost ceaselessly. So Mark had told him. Whether or not Mark himself had cried he did not say. Nor did anyone mention whether Ellen had cried. She had loved him once, as he had loved her; surely she had cried. It was the nature of the poor human animal. (He saw in his mind the black Geoffrey Stewart, smiling at the piano, beloved on every hand, but a truth-teller, enemy of evil—“God’s dog,” as Kierkegaard had put it once—the most solitary man in the world. Bad for the heart.) He thought of Michael Nugent, then shrank away. He returned to that other (along with Kierkegaard) of Zarathustra’s apes.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

Toward morning, when the sky outside his window, above the mountains, was beginning to bloom like a dark corpse gloomily stirring toward life, his eyes snapped open and he was suddenly wide awake, starving hungry but indifferent to food, thinking with fierce concentration of the place above Blue Mountain Lake, up in the Adirondacks, where he’d gone, all those summers, to be alone and try to write. It was an old, decaying “camp,” a building of heavy logs hanging precariously now on its broad stone chimneys. It was three stories high, wide porches on each story looking out through trees at the valley and fog-shrouded water. It had leaded, diamond-paned windows no longer proof against flies and moths, a large, old-fashioned kitchen with an antique gas range, a sink with a pump on it, and built-in cupboards of a kind seldom seen since the early 1900s. High on the livingroom wall there was a rustic interior balcony and beyond it bedrooms, enough room for four