Mickelsson's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’d gone back to looking through the paper for a house, writing himself notes, occasionally giving a little whistle or muttering to himself. “ ‘Priced to sell.’ I’ll bet! Right before it vanishes in the quicksand!” It was a habit of long standing, this talking to himself, just above a whisper, often in high-flown orotund phrases, often with close-to-the-chest little gestures. One of the things he liked best about his business was the grand tradition of ornate formulations, the effloriate rhetoric of a Goethe, Santayana, Collingwood, or Russell, not to mention Nietzsche—dimly recalled in the prose of living philosophers like Blanchard or, among the younger crowd, Richard Taylor, Peter Singer. In this as in everything, needless to say, he was hopelessly out of fashion, following the no-longer-believed (dis-cred-ited, from creed, Heideggerians would bray); nor did it help when he quoted the ghost of Adam Smith on ethics books that are “dry and disagreeable, abounding in abstruse and metaphysical distinctions, but incapable of exciting in the heart any of those emotions which it is the principal use of books of morality to excite.” Rhetoric was of die Welt, not die Erde, and therefore, in the new, upside-down universe, sin and error. Brahma was out; the jigglings and gyrations of Shiva were in.
    And so the hunt continued. His books and papers lay strewn on the table as they’d been when he’d given up trying to work on them. The sink was filled with dishes, and rather than wash them he bought paper cups and plates. He no longer went out for walks on hot nights but climbed into his rattletrap car, an old Chevy he’d bought for seventy dollars from a student, and drove out to look at houses he couldn’t go through until tomorrow. If the house was empty or there was no one about, he would park in the weeds across the road and sit looking for half an hour, going over in his mind what one might do to save it and dimly imagining what his life might be like if he were to take the place. Mornings, he would dress in the slightly dandified fashion he favored—dark shirt, ascot tie, a light summer suit only slightly frayed, dark blue hankie in the pocket, and on his head—pressing down his erumpent red hair—the vaguely Westernish broad-brimmed hat that signalled his difference from other philosophers (as if any such signal were needed), aligning him more nearly with the Southern or Western poets who came, every week or so, to read their flashy junk to the Department of Anguish.
    He pursued the hunt as if doomed to it, locked on his senseless course like a planet. Not quite senseless, perhaps. One might speak of the quiet without which creativity cannot hear itself think; one might mention the example of Wittgenstein, who had come to a whole new vision while designing and building his sister’s house. But those were not really Peter Mickelsson’s reasons—unless in this too as in so many things, he was deluded. Never mind, for the moment. (That was the slogan of his crisis: for the moment.) It must suffice, for the moment, that, reading in the paper of a house for sale—“Country living, 10 acres …” or “Cottage, 2 bedrooms, trout stream, outbuildings”—he felt an urge, almost irresistible, to go look. Whatever the meaning of the compulsion, it kept him moving, kept him just ahead of the shadow at his back, despair.
    It also kept his smouldering anger fed. Who would believe the desperation and shamelessness of humanity! He saw so-called farmhouses in the middle of town, chopped-up rooms, shoddy plastering, panelling made of paper, light fixtures too tawdry for the grungiest motel; went out to see something described as “small ranch, top condition,” and found a trailer. He saw dry-rot, termites, flood-wrecks, asphalt front yards (“tennis courts”); pleasant little cottages on two hundred acres of swamp