The Infinities Read Online Free PDF

and night without pause. But does a vegetable see, does a vegetable hear, does a vegetable—and this surely is the clincher—does a vegetable cogitate?
    The doctors have not witnessed him opening his eyes and do not believe his wife when she says that he does. That he looks at her. That he sees her. They put on a stolidly blank expression and say nothing but she knows that inwardly they scoff, even Dr. Schweitzer I mean Fortune, Dr. Ferdinand Fortune, old Ferdie. Pah, doctors, what do they know?
    He fears premature burial.
    There is no pain. In the pain department he feels nothing. Or not nothing, exactly. He has an awareness of something, a dinning and hammering deep inside him, the surely agonising effects of which register only as a distant rumour. He is trapped in the celestial dentist’s chair.
    Yet why is he not content with this state? Is it not the apotheosishe always hankered after, to be pure mind, mind unalloyed? Whirling and whirling his thoughts go, like the so many grains of grit swept up in a dust-devil. Pure mind, aye, pure thought.
    He might have stipulated a little bell to be set on a stick above his plot with a string going down into the hole and tied to one of his fingers. But to what avail? Not even a digit is he capable of stirring. He has thought of a telephone, too, in the coffin, but how would he dial?
    An hour ago, when his wife was here—or was it before she came? or after?—he heard the early train grinding past, making the window-panes buzz. When he was a child his mother took him once on that same train to the city for a Christmas treat and bought him a ten-shilling watch, which soon broke. Even in those days the train used to stop here for no reason, in the middle of nowhere, and he would press his face to the window and look longingly at this house standing in a shroud of frost-smoke—this very house, if he is not mistaken and he believes he is not—and dream of living here, of being what his disparaging mother would have called a big fellow, with money and a motor car and a camel-hair overcoat. A big fellow, now felled.
    His mind wanders. There are gaps, short and sometimes longer periods of absence, when he is lost to himself, or no, not lost, but as if astray on some far, flat shore, at nightfall, with no moon, and the sea a fringe of soiled white foam off on the horizon, and the sea birds high up, calling and crying in the brumous air.
    By the way, tenses: he is stuck in the present, though his preference would be for the preterite. As for the future, he avoids it as the plague. He wishes he had the powers of that emperor ofold Cathay who on his deathbed forbade the use of the future tense throughout his vast realm, saying that since he was going to die there would be no future to speak of.
    He wonders what time of day it is. If what he heard a while past was indeed the early train it means the sun will be well risen by now. He searches the ceiling for a sign of it but all up there is greyly indistinct, thanks to the curtains his wife insists on keeping pulled day and night. He is reminded of Venice—why? Surely a Venetian ceiling would be awash with lozenges of water-light, a shimmering, amoebic pulsing, and not, as here, soft-grey and crumbly-seeming, like mould. Yet it is definitely the city on the lagoon this memoryless memory is of. Venice! La Serenissima , as they call it, her. Whereas I think of a sea-captain’s frowsty old relict, una vecchia carampana , in tide-stained billows of watered silk, squatting on her piles. To the picturesque I have always had a healthy aversion. I consider it healthy.
    But why do I say an hour ago? I have— he has, he , I must stick to the third person—he has lost track of time, he who once was one of time’s masters and a keeper of its keys. Now the things that happen merge and flow through each other unresisted, a hopeless mishmash.
    Yet there must have been a ceiling like this somewhere, in a waterside villa or hotel room in some southern