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

to believe that, they might just as well,” she would say, hollow-voiced. Such bleakness of heart in one so young was disturbing, and Mickelsson rarely called on her if he could help it. Sometimes, turning to her side of the room, he would find her large, sullen eyes settled on him—beautiful eyes, shiny as dark glass—and he would wonder in brief distress whether there were perhaps something he ought to be saying to her, some phrase he had at hand, insufficiently valued, that might transform her way of seeing. She reminded him a little of a bird in winter, round head drawn in toward the shoulders. He knew better than to brood on it. He’d seen enough to know that philosophy follows chemistry. If she stared at him with the cool detachment of a wood-nymph, or someone terminally ill (he got a memory-flash of his father in the hospital), it was not because she’d been musing too long on, say, Spengler.

Miss Mariani was still watching him with large-faced interest. She had not noticed, apparently, that the discussion of I. F. Stone’s charge was, for the moment at least, dead. Harry Kaplan in the back row passed a note to the red-headed girl beside him. Weber? Webster? She opened it, glancing up nearsightedly at Mickelsson and, seeing that she’d been caught, blushed. He returned his attention—thinking he might quickly get rid of them—to the opinions of Alan Blassenheim.

“I take it you’re suggesting,” he said, “that there is indeed a ‘divine plan,’ a sort of ‘museum of eternal forms,’ as a certain reading of Plato has it“—he shot a look at Blassenheim, telegraphing the punch and half smiling to soften its effect when it came—“and Nature, by random evolutionary groping, struggles to find her way to those forms one by one.” He glanced at Nugent, then back, as he added, “More or less like the roomful of apes at typewriters, trying to stumble onto War and Peace.”

Here and there students snickered, Nugent among them, not necessarily because they’d understood. (Out of control, he thought; he couldn’t even handle the discussion of freshmen.) Blassenheim blinked, not yet fully aware that his suggestion had been made to appear too silly to pursue. Mickelsson felt at the back of his mind a troublesome struggle of contradictions: annoyance at the too easy laughter of the young man’s classmates, and a twinge of pity for Blassenheim, whose suggestions, after all, were more interesting than any those who laughed at him were likely to come up with; a touch of impatience at the fact that, year after year, one covered the same old ground; but also a surge of impatience with himself, not just for losing the thread, falling into chaos (there was a time when he’d have laid all this out clearly, with contagious excitement), but also for striking out at poor Blassenheim. He thought of his own son Mark, unhappy in college, an eager, nervous boy whose teachers had no appreciation of his gifts—his sweetness of soul, his devotion to ideas, his monkish diligence and care. It was not, he was certain, the opinion of a doting parent. Mickelsson knew the university world, its shoddiness and self-absorption; and he’d seen the boy’s carelessly graded papers.

The thought of his son brought with it a clammy sensation it took him a moment to identify: the visit of the I.R.S. agents, their alarming knowledge of everything in his life, including the fact, trivial in itself, that Mark was involved in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Their visit had been more than a month ago now. He’d heard nothing since. Alas, nothing from his son either.

“I don’t mean to dismiss your suggestion too hastily,” Mickelsson said, struggling against inertia—struggling and, at the deepest level, failing, dealing with Blassenheim’s murky, difficult notions by a magic trick: deliberately changing the issue. “It may well be that the universe is filled with ghostly forms waiting to be realized. But if they aren’t yet realized—or, worse, if they should happen never to be realized—it would seem necessary for us to figure out in what sense we can claim they exist.”

Quickly, Blassenheim said, wildly improvising, darting up his hand to give his speaking legitimacy, apparently unaware that his point had been palmed and pocketed, “I understand your objection, but maybe that’s where, like, consciousness differs from the rest. Maybe it’s wrong to talk about physical objects and eternal forms—the perfect zebra, say.” He smiled and shrugged, opening his hands again. “But maybe with thoughts it’s a whole different business. Like mathematics, for instance, or chemical formulas. Like the number two. It was up there for millions of years before anybody thought of it, right? It’s built into, you know, like, the structure of things.” He folded his arms, closing the hands on the well-developed shoulders.

“Well, not really, not exactly,” Mickelsson said and pretended to smile. Should one drift off to Wittgenstein—words as names, words as functions? He sighed and glanced at the clock.

Now Michael Nugent had his hand up, his pale eyes a little like those of an I.R.A. killer, or so Mickelsson imagined. “Are you saying the ‘eternal verities’ that Faulkner talks about, there aren’t any?”

Mickelsson started to answer, then paused, arrested by a hunch that the boy was speaking ironically, scoffing at Faulkner’s hopes. He met Nugent’s eyes and believed the hunch correct. “All I meant to be suggesting,” he said, looking down at his pipe for a moment, “is that ‘Plato’s Ideas,’ insofar as we can call them that—” He paused again, glancing at Miss Mariani, who sat smoking hard, writing in her notebook. She breathed the smoke deep, then let it seep out. He’d lost his thread. Then it came back to him. “ ‘Plato’s Ideas’ ”—he spoke directly to Nugent—“have a fascistic tendency only if we argue that the universe is hopelessly unreasonable, so that the rule of reason in human society is unsupportable, absurd.” Abruptly he got up from the desk, went to the blackboard behind it, and picked up a short