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

or five families, though he stayed there alone. Ellen had hated wilderness all her life, except in Shakespeare’s plays. She was afraid of bears and susceptible to pollens, insects, the effects of damp weather. She wouldn’t hear of his taking the children there with him, and though he’d argued, sometimes hotly, and had sometimes gotten them to visit for a day or two, he’d been secretly pleased.

Sometimes he would type all day and far into the night, or read the books he’d brought with him, whole trunkloads, puffing solemnly and tranquilly on his pipe, sometimes sipping gin or, more often, in those days, white wine. At other times Mickelsson would drop all his pretenses and set off with a walking-stick through the thick, rustling leaves, on his back a knapsack and Army & Navy Store sleeping-bag, and would roam until night fell, then hang his knapsack too high and on too narrow a branch for the bears to get, and would sleep under the trees and stars. He would find things, exploring the world with the excitement of a child: cave-mouths, which he’d enter, crawling along carefully until the darkness was too much for him. In one of them he could hear a distant waterfall. Sometimes he came upon long-abandoned roads, faint traces of foundations—houses, large old hotels, not a timber still standing. He would sit sometimes, still as a stump, watching bears, sometimes deep in the woods, more often at the garbage dump behind the Adirondack Museum, owner of the camp where, courtesy of the curator, he stayed. Sometimes he would borrow from the curator one of the museum’s canoes or, if he was lucky, an old-time Adirondack guideboat, and would set off across the water with two or three days’ worth of provisions—he could have packed into the guideboat a month’s worth, if he’d wished—and would paddle his way north toward Canada, lake by lake, avoiding villages and camps, though he liked seeing their lights. He’d pass deer with huge racks, sometimes a family of bears that had waded into the dark, glass-smooth water to fish. They would watch him with lifted heads as he passed. It seemed that if he waved, they would wave back. High above his head, toward dusk, he would sometimes spot an eagle.

It had never seemed to him there that the world was a cypher, the “Great Cryptogram” Rifkin ironically spoke of. There the world was itself, as immediate as his thought, his huge, nameless desires. Back in the camp he would write essays, chapters, explanations and speculations with the carefree delight of a child lost in fantasy, perhaps because there in the Adirondack Mountains no explanation seemed necessary, the art of philosophy was exactly as Tom Garret had described it that night to Blassenheim, a joy to work at, for the kind of people who naturally took to it, a joy just as pottery might be, or leathercraft. There in the Adirondacks the world was visibly what it had seemed to Bergson (gentlest of Nietzsche’s children), all unity and flow, not divisible into instants, intellectual apprehensions: to write of the world, chop it up into its logic, was so patently a game that the writing was a harmless delight, like the activity of children inventing words, or Jesus the Joker, as his grandfather used to say (utterly humorless), making up his punning, logic-boggling parables to make fools of human reason and the devil. (Like the father of his reflections, he was forever reasoning on the worthlessness of reason. “As much as a cow understands about her own life, that’s how much we know.”—Luther.) There in the Adirondacks, where there were no people, the philosopher’s arrogant confusion was impossible—though he suffered one other great confusion, which made clarity not worth the candle. A tangible longing came over him, at times, to talk to people. Sometimes, late at night, the longing would be too much for him, and he’d walk down to the village, a mile below, to the payphone outside the canoe-rental place, and would call Ellen. “Peter!” she would say, half annoyed, half pleased to hear from him. “Are you drunk? Do you know what time it is?” Time. There was no time!

In one of his essays, which he’d thrown out later as overwrought nonsense—or thrown out, really, because he no longer cared about the argument—he’d made the universe something more than Bergsonian. The primal nut from which the Big Bang had come—so Mickelsson had argued—was in some sense Mind: Mind in Whitehead’s sense, say. But it was Mind incapable of knowing itself, having nothing to judge or measure by, Time, Space, Matter. The whole history of evolution, then, from hydrogen to the ape that can sing its own song, the explosion up and out, with its innumerable mistakes and misjudgments and false starts and, down at the heart of things, its fierce determination, creating against all probability, in defiance of the limits of natural selection—homing in, through the millennia, with maniacal single-mindedness, on its dream of the unthinkable (the human eye, the juxtaposed thumb, the brain)—was the history of that primal blind Mind in pursuit of self-knowledge, that is, God’s rise into self-awareness. Mickelsson had not yet heard, at that time, of Lloyd Motz, and hadn’t had available the physics, chemistry, or biology to reach Motz’ conclusion, that among all living organisms there will always be one, the main track in the maze, in which the probability for evolution to higher and higher forms must always be maximum, in man an effect of the symmetry and three-dimensional structure of DNA molecules; but he’d anticipated Motz’ idea that cosmic self-knowledge—the development of the body and brain of God, as Mickelsson had put it—took the whole eighty-seven-billion-year evolutionary ride, at the zenith of which, overwhelmed by its own weight, it must collapse with an agonized cry to the darkness of its beginning.

It had been, in a way, the mountains, not Mickelsson, that had created the theory. He had long before given up theism,