Giles Goat Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

think how he should be dealt with; the situation was slipping my hold, disengaging from me as much else had lately seemed to do. For example, I’d forgotten my pills again, which I’d come to need regularly not to fall asleep over my work: that accounted for my present somnolence, no doubt. I told him that the book was to be called
The Seeker—
or perhaps
The Amateur
, I could not decide …
    “Certainly.” The pleasure with which he stroked his beard was plainly not at the excellence of my titles. “
A seeker;
an
amateur:
one who is a lover, so to speak, but not a knower; a passionate
naïf—
am I right?”
    Well, he was. Do you know, the great mistake we make in these encounters comes not at their end but here, at the very outset. The moment our mysterious caller comes to the door, or we recognize we’ve made a wrong turn somewhere and are in alien realms—
then
is when we should take instant, vigorous action: protest at once against the queerness of it, shut the door, close eyes and ears, and not for one second admit him. Another step down his road and there’ll be no returning—let us stop where we are! Alas: Curiosity whispers to Better Judgment, “It’s too late anyway,” and we always go on.
    “He’s about thirty,” my visitor supposed.
    “Thirty-three, I guess.”
    “Thirty-three and four months? And I’m sure he has some affliction-something physical, that he was probably born with—is he a cripple?”
    I hadn’t thought of making my man a cripple, though it was true that he seldom left his quarters (in the top of a certain tower), preferring the company of his books and amateur scientific apparatus to that of his fellow men. “He’s just nearsighted, is all,” I said, “but he does have a port-wine birthmark on his temple—”
    “Cancerous!” the stranger cried. “You’ll make it turn out to be cancerous! Oh, that’s very good. But shouldn’t he have some sort of astigmatism instead of myopia?”
    Ah, it was so right, so righter that the seeker’s vision be
twisted
instead of merely blurred—and to make the birthmark incipiently cancerous, what a stroke that would be! For the first time in half a year I grew truly interested in my book. Putting reticence by, I outlined the plot to this remarkable visitor of mine, who displayed a keener grasp of my concerns than any critic or reviewer I’d read—keener, I smiled tosuppose, than myself, who in recent months had come nearly to forgetting what was my vision of things.
    “It’s about
love
, as you say; but a very special kind. People talk about two sorts of love, you know, the kind that tries to escape the self and the kind that affirms the self. But it seems to me there’s a third kind of love, that doesn’t seek either union or communion with its object, but merely admires it from a position of utter detachment—what I call the Innocent Imagination.” My hero, I explained, was to be a Cosmic Amateur; a man enchanted with history, geography, nature, the people around him—everything that
is the case—
because he saw its arbitrariness but couldn’t understand or accept its finality. He would deal with reality like a book, a novel that he didn’t write and wasn’t a character in, but only an appreciative reader of; naturally he would assume that there were other novels, better ones and worse … But in truth, of course, he
wasn’t
finally a spectator at all; he couldn’t stay “out of it”; and the fiascos of his involvements with men and women—in particular the revelation of his single mortal fate—these things would make him at the end, if not an authentic person, at least an expert amateur, so to speak, who might aspire to a kind of honorary membership in the human fraternity.
    “I think there’s some heroism in that, don’t you?” I was, in truth, never more enthusiastic about my story. It
was
a great conception after all, and little inspirations came as I spoke: the seeker must be not only astigmatic but