Mr. Potter Read Online Free PDF Page B

the beauty of the sky and the light and the sea was ugly when seen through his eyes. And in those days Nathaniel Potter was beautiful also: his legs were long and strong and they were of help to him as he rowed his boat; his arms were long and strong and they were of tremendous help to him as he rowed his boat into the very deep waters; his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and his hair, which was the color of copper and had the texture of metal shredded to resemble tangled thread, made him beautiful, so much so that he was really the father of twenty-one children who had different mothers but Nathaniel knew only of eleven of them. And in those days of the beautiful sky and the beautiful light and the beautiful waters with the sky leaking, sometimes leaking light, sometimes leaking water, and the light streaking through the sky, sometimes creating intolerable heat, and the waters of
the sea so turbulent, Nathaniel Potter found no fish in his pots and when he cast his net no fish were trapped, and this went on for such a long time. And as he grew old, his life grew harder: he could no longer easily make a joke when faced with misfortune: no fish in his fish pots and fishnet. And the sun was in its rightful place in the sky and the sky itself was blue and the waters were calm on the surface and it was an ordinary day just to look at it, there was no trace of commotion just to look at the landscape, the landscape was so untroubled, as if it had never known the hand of man or the wrath of a god, as if it had never been observed, as if no one had ever claimed to own it and as if its ownership had never been contested; as if it had never known so much as the capriciousness that was within nature itself, a capriciousness that was beyond human understanding.
    And on a day such as that: Nathaniel Potter could hear the faint sound of all that had been capricious and had come to make up his life: his children and their mothers, his ancestors from some of the many places that make up Africa and from somewhere in Spain and from somewhere in England and from somewhere in Scotland. And the faint sound of all that he was made of caused him to grow angry, caused him to grow almost happy and curious but then angry again, and the anger welled up in him and he was all alone in the world, the world that refused to bear any
trace of the capriciousness of history or the capriciousness of memory, the world that had passed away. But Nathaniel Potter could not so simply come into such a day and into such a landscape, for at that moment his very existence was part of all that surrounded him. The very shape of the earth, for instance: he was part of its mysterious and endless beginnings, he was part of its boundaries; the day, the night, the light from the sun forcing its way through the heavens onto the land on which he stood, all this too was part of what made him. How simple he was then, how without knowledge of harm he was then, how beautiful, how innocent, how perfect.
    Nathaniel Potter could not read and he did not make a child who could do so. He made eleven children but he did not make one who could read and so write. He made a fishing boat with his own hands, he made the oars with which to row his fishing boat, he sat under a tree and made himself a fishing net, and while he was doing all those things his life flowed out of him and then flowed back into him again; and there was nothing he could make of himself, for he was happy sometimes and sad sometimes and angry sometimes and helpless sometimes and without hope sometimes and there was nothing he could make of himself. How it rained when he did not want it to do so, how the rain refused to come down when he wished it would do so, how fast the dark that is night
fell when he wanted the light of day to last longer and to shine brighter, how harsh, as it falls on his bare head, could something so innocent as the rays of the sun be!
    And that boat, how did he come to know the way in which it should be