Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

think we can make up values, like Midas deciding, on insufficient evidence, that what people really need is a world made of gold, or like Nietzsche deciding, on insufficient evidence, that the future belongs to ‘the sons of the Prussian officers.’ ”

“But what if it does?” Craine burst out, flustered. “By your law of mere fitness, what if he was right? Take people’s hatred of the Jews.” He looked away from Ira’s face, then resolutely back, straight into his eyes. “You think it was beaten when Hitler lost the war—if he did lose the war?” He was aware, too late, that it came out like a snarl, as if Craine were the chief and most deadly of anti-Semites.

Ira Katz shrugged as if the matter were of no great importance to him, but his eyes lowered, and his voice became more serious, studiously reasonable and offhand. “If Nietzsche was right, then his position will win. Survival of the fittest. Millions upon millions of gentle, well-meaning creatures have been wiped out by the centuries.”

There was a silence, as if both of them, in their embarrassment, had lost the thread. Craine’s eyes settled on the snapshot of Ira Katz’s children. The photograph beside it was of their mother—not Jewish, it came to him. He quickly looked away and busied himself relighting his pipe, then refilling his glass. It was late, he must be going. An increasing sense of urgency churned in him. Whatever it was that he’d come to find out, they hadn’t gotten near it, or rather, one moment they’d be edging in on it, the next they’d be light-years off. He was like a man who’d stayed late at a tedious party, hoping against hope, and now the others were leaving, the talk of the few who remained was turning insidious, his hopes were growing slimmer by the moment. He raised his glass with a quick jerk and drank. Like a train in the station, starting up before you realize it’s done so, the room began to move.

There was a trace of a quaver in Ira Katz’s voice when he spoke again, as if Craine’s accidental attack had stirred memories. “Whatever is true is true,” he said. “We have to live with that.” He shrugged as if trying to submit to his own rule. His eyes, looking down at the carpet between Craine and himself, were solemn. “We were talking about detective novels. About getting at the truth. There’s something I tell my students … ” He took a deep breath, as if he couldn’t get air enough. Craine noticed only now that the room was hot. Sweat ran down his neck. Ira was saying, “We have only two ways of finding out what’s true, what will work. By history’s blind groping, one damn thing after another, as they say”—he took another deep breath—“or by rigorous imagination, which in the end means by poems and novels.” He flicked his eyes up at Craine. “Get everything exactly right, and maybe you save people the pain of history gone wrong.”

“Ha!” Craine barked, not in scorn but only to stop the talk for a moment, make the room stop moving, give himself time to think—though scorn was what it sounded like, Craine knew.

Ira Katz shrugged and leaned back in his chair, abandoning him. The room now moved steadily to the left. Ira Katz remembered his wineglass on the table and took a sip, then put the glass down gently and glanced at the clock just beside it. Quarter to eleven. Again he took one of those deep, pained breaths, and his glance went briefly to the bedroom door. This time Craine registered it. Was it possible that the man had a girl in there? If so, she was as quiet as a corpse. For an instant he imagined it clearly: a lead-gray dead girl, some college student with long blond hair, naked on Ira Katz’s bed. Craine shuddered and drank. No, not possible, he thought, and briefly understood with perfect clarity what Ira Katz was saying about imagination testing truth. At once Craine lost it. “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” the clocks said everywhere around him, heavily sibilant but clear as day. He was imagining it, of course, he told himself; but in fact, he saw the next instant, he was not. The word was unmistakable. They’d been saying it all night, it came to him. He sat still as a boulder, stunned by the discovery. The Vedic priests were right: sounds corresponded to natural forces in the universe. Everything was language, the very atoms maniacally whirling in the chair where he sat. Word of God, he thought, half ironic, half crazily gleeful, and for an instant closed his eyes. He fell through space, plummeting, and at once snapped his eyes open and was stabilized.

For all that was happening—Time off its rhythm, as if rushing out past the edge of the universe—Ira Katz was saying calmly, reasonably, “You may be right that it’s impossible for human beings to know the truth, but whatever the real history of the world is, we’re part of it, made of the same material. The minute we step outside it—or allow some son of a bitch to push us outside it—we’re done for. That’s what survival of the fittest means, being made of the same thing the universe is, and able to move when the universe moves. In that sense all novels are detective novels, or ought to be. People hunting for connections.” Incredibly—since usually, drunk or sober, Craine was like lightning at catching such things—Craine realized only now that Ira Katz was in some way talking about himself. He, Ira Katz, was the man not fit to survive, or so he thought—not “connected.” Was that what it was about, then, the poetry writing?—the endless, passionate turning over of trivia—autumn days, the eyes of chickens? Strange that Craine should be surprised by it. He’d known for years that it was hardly for himself alone that the jig was up.

Before he knew