Excerpt



Up from the dark depths of ignominy, truth makes its slow laborious way, Morgan Thomley wrote.

He sat looking at the words where they lay upon the screen and wondered if he had actually written them. What did they mean? What significance had they? None whatsoever, he thought and promptly deleted the entire line. There was no truth anywhere, merely illusion parading as truth.

Why do you bring old things for us to read? the young man had asked.

Indeed, why did he bring old things for them to examine as if they were new. That they were new to the critics should not have been irrelevant to the young man. That they were old to him was. Yes. The words were old, had been laid down decades ago, a score and more of years in which he had thought that words, when laid down from the heart, had existence of their own and somehow never grew old.

A school teacher once. Even that was more than a half-score years ago. He had spent some thirty and more years teaching what the book publishers called deathless prose. Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, Twain. He had taught them all and more and those who published the books said they were words for all seasons, all times. Yet came the question, Why do you bring old things for us to read?

He would like to have answered, Because they have existence. They exist in an intangible universe where some things never grow old. But he could not say that for he knew it wasnt true. Only prep schools and doddering old fools believed in the triumph of the word.

There was a greater question lying there: Should he go on bringing words he had laid down in times past for people whom he was now too old to have taught when he attended class with his students? Had the life of those words expired because they were written (Was the word written still relevant, for words are laid on screens now, laid on screens from a keyboard, not on paper with unreadable scrawl) in a time when he was young and eager and loved the process of putting words in a particular order, bringing together the music of their inner being and the palpable sense of their existence because they rang in the mind like a bell from a high tower?

Dont write long sentences (or questions), they said. Such sentences plug the mind. Long sentences plug the mind in the way long stool plugs the toilet, he thought. If the trap is short and narrow, the plug comes quickly and much more often. Yet he was given to long sentences as if they were the tools of the complete mind that could, and would, if given a chance, surround complex thought and make of it not only something of sense, but something divine, as if God himself had laid it in the mind of the writer and the writer had no right to remove it from the page or screen or whatever the manner of the creation and presentation so laid down.