The Life of the Mind by Joshua Ferris

1.

HE WAS BORN POOR. HE DIDN’T MIND. No shame in that. Lots of boys wore hand-me-downs. Lots of parents fought over money. He was just happy to be alive. He loved waking to a new morning. He loved the smell of rain. Also: wood grains, sunlight, wet leaves, the right stick, rust on screws and bolts, rocks with colour in them. There was plenty to be seduced by in this world that didn’t require a dime. He even liked how day turned suddenly to night during a tornado. The terror contained a thrill that money couldn’t buy.

How ignorant his parents were, how stupid his people: now that bothered him. Halfwits and knuckle-draggers. They were placed in institutions from an early age, caught red-handed committing dumb crimes. When they didn’t go off and die young, they made what livings were available to them in small prairie towns, places like Westville, Granary, Pine Hollow. There, behind tin shacks, they bathed outdoors over corrugated tubs, staring up slackmouthed at trees and wondering what day it was. He was mortified, he liked to say later in life, a priori.

He had cousins who threw themselves head-first into hedgerows just for the fun of it. He never understood that. On more than one trip to Pine Hollow to visit his mother’s side of the family, his four cousins, all boys, made a game of flinging themselves into the neighbour’s scrawny bushes, then jumping up laughing with scraped arms and bloody necks. What sense did that make? He prided himself on the advantages of an intelligence that had sailed right past his poor benighted relations.

He was a teenager by then. Things were happening to his mind and body. He went around the house surly, verbally trashing all that was in sight. He was no longer happy by default, and rain was an inconvenience. He slept a lot. He masturbated. He didn’t understand masturbation. Who does? It was even a little vile. Yet he did it frequently and furiously every chance he got — just before church, or when company was over — sampling the sperm afterwards. Did that make him gay? He didn’t know. It hardly mattered. In those days, the image of a robin’s nest or a tube sock could turn him on. Why? It was all a mystery. It was all a great, shrouded, confounding mystery and he was in a hurry to lift it, to examine its contents, to know.

HIS MOTHER, A HOUSE DRESS WITH DREAMS, earned her egg money for years by selling kettle corn at state fairs. By the time her son turned 10, she had secured for her operation a mobile booth with deep fryer and refrigeration. Hitched to the back of a pickup, the booth could do 42 down the backroads and a cool 50 on the paved interstate. She was known from Carbondale to the Quad Cities as “Grandma Perkins”, her pies Perkins Pies, and her cotton candy “The Stars and Stripes on a Stick.”

He hated the whole Perkins routine, her backward clientele paying with their grubby pocket change, his mother’s chipper falsity as she handed down to them their dripping and saturate sweets. But he was always gladly her first taster. She plied him with nutballs, elephant ears, caramel apples, kettle corn, lollipops, cotton candy, and her personal twist on the jack straw. He opened his mouth for her like a little baby bird — but in her ignorance, she never told him to brush.

He was 17 when he brought his toothaches to her attention. The complaint came with a request so foreign to her, so misguided, she believed it could only originate in a Youth of Today.

“Now, Henry,” she said, pausing her scooping up and plopping down of dough into the sizzling fryer where, jostling one another excitedly, her mini-doughnuts browned in anticipation of the paying customers now arriving at the Annual Sweet Corn Festival of Hoopeston, Illinois. “What on earth would you want to do that for?”

“Come on, Ma. You’re supposed to go twice a year.”

“Who said that?”

“Everyone says it! The nurse at school, the commercials on TV.” “Oh, Hank, honey. Don’t you know what a dentist is, really? It’s a Jewish conspiracy. Dentists are only interested in taking your money.”

“But Ma, my teeth!”

“What about them?”

“For starters, they hurt. And these two are coming loose.” “Well, of course they’re coming loose, honey. Losing your teeth is just a fact of life like anything else.”

“A fact of life?”

“Sure, it runs in the family. Look here.”

With two fingers and an expert thumb, Grandma Perkins extracted a glistening dental plate from the roof of her mouth. A fresh-pond creature up from the sludge, it came at him hooked to a line of spittle, and at once his mother was denuded of all her top teeth, and with them a good portion of her humanity. He drew back in horror.

“What is that?” he cried.

This disgusting compromise of the human being — teeth outside the mouth! — was even more revolting than masturbation. He pestered his mother until she agreed to throw away some of her

hard-earned Grandma Perkins money on a trip to the dentist, for she loved her son Henry more than anyone else in the world.

DR PAUL O’ROURKE OF BETHLEHEM DENTAL was located on North Vermilion, between Kinney’s Educator Shoes and Fashion Women’s Clothing. O’Rourke had the reputation, as colourful dentists sometimes do, for being sexually suspect if not criminally insane, but this was only an example of the collective misunderstanding that can grip a small town in the face of a man’s fundamental good cheer.

On the day of Henry’s appointment, O’Rourke was dressed as he was on any other day: in the starched whites of an orderly keeping peace inside an asylum. He invited his patient into the room, laid him flat in no time with a pneumatic foot valve, and bent the arm of a primitive waffle light in place. He supplemented that pale moonbeam with a headlamp before requesting that Henry open wide and … “Relax, son,” he said. “Just relax.”

His poking and prodding was accompanied by a happy hum. His patient, meanwhile, seized the armrests in a death grip while his lower half squirmed like a landed fish. Soon the doctor, with a kindly pat, instructed him to sit up and spit. As he watched his rich red blood pinken and circle the drain, Henry was reminded of his part-time job at Farnsworth Poultry, where he sluiced animal blood off the walls of the kill pits for a dollar an hour. Was he, a human being, no different from a broiler strung up by the feet and borne toward the waiting blade for beheading, draining, piecemealing and packaging? O’Rourke bent him back in place, and he was squirming again in no time.

“Henry,” the dentist said, an interminable time later, as he stood to wash his hands. “You haven’t been taking very good care of your teeth.”

The prognosis was grim. Six teeth on top and four below were rotted and needed to be removed that day. He had thought two, at most. O’Rourke proposed to drill, fill, and seal those 10 before piecing together a pretty new smile using bridges and crowns. Then, with diligence from the patient and a little luck from God, the others might be saved. It was a real drag, and the dentist knew it, but if Henry was prepared to fight, the good doctor was, too.

“What do you say, young man?” O’Rourke, who was known around town for his dirty mouth, an irony in a dentist, said to him, adding, “Ready to fight this son of a bitch with me, or what?” He never went back.

“You’re right,” he told his mother. “They just take your money.”

2.

he was carnap’s final research assistant at UCLA. After graduation, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied canonical models with a disciple of Russell’s. While a research fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin, he dressed in a tuxedo and played Bach’s cantatas at the Gedächtniskirche on the first Sunday of every month. Throughout his thirties, he wrestled with a single question: “Must an agent be able to act differently from how she inevitably does act to count as free?” He gathered his findings under the title Wordsworth: Happy Hiker on a Forced March, which won the Lakatos Award. He was its youngest recipient. Chester hired him away from Arizona the following year.

Now he was a leading philosopher of mind, tenured, with an endowed chair, a local king of narrow focus presiding over conferences and peer reviews. He lived in New York City, where he taught on the faculty of a fancy university alongside Chalmers and Ned Block. He had an honorary degree from the University of Haifa, Israel, and was a Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Two grey and opposing squirrel tails served him for eyebrows. His four cousins were dead.

It was that chair that had kept him alive, he believed — that, and his office in Bailey Hall. He ate sushi for lunch. He swam laps at the Y. He walked from office to home. But mainly, he sat. He reclined. He arrived at ideas. He ran them by his colleagues. He took catnaps. He dreamed. He reassured himself that he was on the right track. His cousins were dead but not him. He was alive. He had an office in Bailey Hall.

The office, like the man who occupied it, was bearded. That is to say, a grey dust coated the many books and shelves that crowded the modest square footage within which, for years, for decades, Henry Carmichael had cocooned himself with his ideas of order, his soothing conclusions, his hard-fought ways forward.

All at a dead end now. He departed his doctor’s office in a daze. He took an overcrowded elevator to the ground floor. How was it possible, he wondered, for a single car to be so packed full of new mothers? No one spoke a word. Outside, the tarnished gloom of the institution vanished, replaced by the sunshine of a new spring morning. It fell between the buildings of the hospital campus, plastered whole slabs of the sidewalk, and brightened the budding pear trees. Suddenly, the sun seemed to halt, to take two steps back, to bark at him, to leap forward and bound at his side, to make every attempt to jump into his lap (though he was still walking, still trying to process the news) in order to paw at him, lick his face and bring him joy. He wanted to swat it away, lean down,

demand that it sit. Sit, damn it! Behave! This is no time for games. Didn’t the damn sun understand that he was dying? It didn’t care. He came to a park bench where, in a tiny corner of wrought-iron, he hid his tears with his hand.

Twelve days earlier, his curiosity, undimmed over a lifetime, had encouraged him to opt out of a general anaesthetic for what was supposed to be entirely routine. In a bright operating theatre on the 13th floor of the building that now towered over him in the background, he remained lucid throughout the 40-minute procedure, chatting with the medical crew before a live feed (with dismayingly high definition) as his doctor tracked the progress of an industrial bendy straw through the spooky cavern of his guts.

Almost immediately, he regretted his decision. His curiosity was not rewarded by anything he saw on screen. It revealed something alien, a featureless fauna of the ocean deep closely related in tint and contour to the dental plate his mother had extracted from her mouth so long ago. He harboured this dumb, dehumanising thing inside himself. It pulsated blindly with a will of its own. He was at the mercy of a worm. If something went wrong with his inner worm, he would die. Was he anything more than its dull, involuntary contractions, or only some mere emergence of it; the worm perfected?

He made a solemn vow there and then to keep strictly to a diet of Brussels sprouts and granola bars once he was back in pants — a promise that ended the next day with a pepperoni pie and two bottles of beer. But the memory lingered: how unappealing to be saddled with a creature like a large intestine as it sorted and shepherded the nutrients necessary for life through the valley of the shadow of death!

Too busy being horrified by the human body, he failed to glimpse the dark turn in that subterranean tour that contained the genuine horror. His doctor did not. That man ordered more tests, followed by more tests. “I’m afraid I have bad news,” Dr Cedarbaum had informed him that morning at their follow-up, before laying out his severely limited and unhappy options. “It has spread from the colon to the liver, and from the liver to your brain.”

IN CITY PARKS, ALONG FOOTPATHS ENCIRCLING LAKES, and even in some airport lounges now, the bench has lately acquired (it would be hard to pinpoint exactly when) a widespread commemorative feature. “In Loving Memory of Butch Malone,” a small gold or silver plate, affixed to the top two slats of the bench, might read in engraved letters, accompanied by Butch’s years on Earth or a brief personal message from his partner, perhaps. Others read more simply. For instance, on the west side of Central Park near the Great Lawn, there is this: “For our daughter, Pam.” And in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport: “For Baby Hector, 2000–2001.”

Henry Carmichael’s bench, one of about a dozen along the winding path from ambulance cul-de-sac to hospital courtyard, each one carefully meted out with a small bed of well-tended tulips, was stamped with its own commemorative plate. Henry eyed it warily. His tears had dried. He was calmer now. An uneasy peace held between him and the fine day. But he’d be damned if he’d lean over and read the name of the memorialised individual whose suffering, unlike his own, had so mercifully come to an end, the lucky bastard.

What does one do with a death sentence? Henry supposed he had to find the will to fight, somehow. “There is one very aggressive cocktail of chemotherapy drugs,” Dr Cedarbaum had suggested, but then Henry had zoned out. He was put in mind of the impossible dilemma he faced at 17: to team up with that irrepressible dentist from his hometown and fight the rot colonising his mouth, or end the torment of a two-hour appointment and pray his bleeding gum pockets and browning rooks of molars bounced back all on their own. He had not made the smart decision. He sensed, in this new one, a test, a dare, a chance to redeem himself by choosing wisely this time.

The life of the mind had been a good one. Thanks to his scholarships, his fellowships, his tenure and his endowed chair, he had had ample time to consider the facts. Where did he stand now with respect to the facts? He wasn’t quite so sure. He needed more time. He was still a little stunned. Yet, where his cousins were concerned — the bush divers of Pine Hollow who tended to come to mind during times like these, milestones and forking paths and, he supposed, death sentences, when their alternative fates helped notch for Henry his progress out of the primordial ooze — the facts spoke for themselves.

Ronald, the youngest, had been the first to go. A car fanatic, he was swept up in a ball of flames. Idiot. He had not yet had the chance to turn 25. A gear head and drag racer, Ronnie had, Henry supposed, died doing what he loved most, charred to a crisp on a strip of hot tar, paling the sun. There had been a name for all that pointless pageantry Ronnie took part in, briefly: the Indianapolis 500. It was famous. Carmichael believed that the automobile had been invented to go from points A to B, but Ronnie had chosen to race around a tight concrete enclosure, cutting people off on purpose. Of course he met a bad end. His death had been televised live on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, then replayed for the next hour and a half. That was

40 years ago. Maybe it’s Ronnie’s name on the back of this bench, he thought, and leaned in at last to have a look.

It was his name. Henry Carmichael!

He drew back in shock. He looked again, closer this time. There was no denying it. The name was his. It was his name. Only the years were off. He hadn’t been born in 1950. He’d been born in 1951. Nor had he died in … 2021? But that was this year! He was indeed expected to die this year, if his doctor was to be believed.

But that was strange, wasn’t it — two Henry Carmichaels living and dying so synchronously? What had that Henry Carmichael done with his life? He couldn’t begin to imagine. What he did know was that that Henry Carmichael disappeared without a trace of suffering. Or so it seemed to the living Henry Carmichael, the scared Henry Carmichael, the Henry Carmichael who still had to die. He wanted to go out like that, to vanish without a trace but for a small memorial on a modest park bench. Some Henry Carmichaels had all the luck. His cell phone was ringing. “Professor Carmichael?”

It was Cedarbaum. Telling from the doctor’s voice, he was all worked up. His words came out rushed, he was nearly breathless. “Professor, I have some absolutely extraordinary news for you, sir. Have I caught you at a good time?”

An hour ago, Cedarbaum had given him three months to live. “Seems about as good a time as any,” he said.

“I don’t know how else to put it, Professor. I’m just stunned. Are you sitting down? Some colleagues of mine at Sloan Kettering — listen to this, just listen. Some colleagues of mine emailed literally one minute ago with details of an experimental trial they’re beginning next month. They are focusing on individuals with precisely your disease profile: inoperable, metastatic, stage four colon cancer with no known treatment protocol. Check, check and check! You know, I’m even shaking a little? That’s how uncanny this is. Honestly, it’s as if they overheard our conversation and then designed this trial with you in mind. I was really sorry to have to inform you that you were basically out of luck, but here you are, sir — in luck! Now, here’s what I suggest you do. Come back into the office as soon as humanly possible and let’s get you signed up for this thing today.”

Ready to fight this son of a bitch with me, or what? He knew his answer. He had learned his lesson.

“Is it safe?” he asked the doctor.

“Safe?”

“Will it hurt?”

Fifty years ago, he had turned a blind eye to disease until his teeth practically fell out on their own. And not without the pain he had hoped to avoid. And then he was back in the chair anyway, to be fitted for dental plates identical to his mother’s so that he might chew solid food again, for he was not in actual fact anyone’s baby bird. He was a grown man. He was an eager lover. He wanted to plant his lips on practically every man he came across, but the brutal fact of false teeth forced him to retreat into the life of a shy and sexless academic.

“Will it hurt?” the doctor repeated, evidently puzzled. “Well, it is an experimental trial, Professor, so of course there are — ” Cedarbaum broke down some of the dangers Henry might run into over the course of the trial, the side effects he might suffer from and the long odds he still faced.

Henry weighed his options. Of course the answer was yes, he would enroll, he would thank his lucky stars that such an extraordinary — “I appreciate the call, Dr Cedarbaum,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s the direction I care to go in.”

3.

HE DID NOT THINK — COULD NOT — WOULDN’T PERMIT THE — must not permit — even the slightest —

Here comes a cab, let us focus on the cab. He has lifted his hand in the air to hail the cab. He can’t recall having stood up from the bench, but here he is, upright on 68th Street. He is stepping inside a cab. Inside the cab there is a strap. He will put his hand in the strap. He will focus on the meter. You may depend on a taxi meter to continue inching up even after a man has been handed — Do not think about death sentences!

Do not think at all. There is a deli going by. Consider the deli. Consider that woman with the dog. Hello, dog. Henry Carmichael had a dog once but then it keeled over and —

Goddamn it, no thinking!

He refuses to wonder what this perversity is all about, this stubborn urge to sabotage himself by refusing to join the experimental trial. If Kant was right that rational cognition requires acts of thought that are at least implicitly conscious, then what the hell is this unthinking acceptance of his fate without putting up a fight? He is taking a cue from his precursor. He plans to disappear like that earlier Carmichael did. Terminal cancer is not the same as ailing teeth. Teeth might be saved, but no one lives indefinitely. Why pretend otherwise? Or so he did permit conscious thought long enough to rationalize that instinct native to him to put off until tomorrow any pain

that might be felt today — even if the consequence is death. An experimental trial… an uncertain outcome… many possible side effects… all to die in the end, anyway? No, thank you.

IN THIS DELICATE WAY, carmichael made it back to his universitysubsidised apartment on the Far West Side. He packed a bag. He left a note. It was addressed to colleagues and his landlord. He departed again without locking the door behind him.

He walked down to Ninth Avenue. He removed his car from the corner garage. He tossed his bag in the back and carefully pulled out, his mind a blank, and aimed for the bridge. It was 1pm. He reached the Adirondack Mountains a little before five. The air was cooler there. It smelled of hemlock and pine, clean and pure. The season was still young, still fragile. Erratic. Would it snow? The question was irrelevant. He left his bag in the car and reached the trailhead in no time. He had not completed a full thought in hours.

The present moment, with its trees, its shifting cloud patterns, made little cameos, as when a section of trail suddenly narrowed, or when a pocket of glacial air took him by surprise, or when he found himself parading across that series of catwalks tucked under sheer cliffs known as “Hitch-Up Matildas” before arriving at a pristine lake. Next thing he knew, he was labouring to breathe as he began his ascent. Mostly he was just out of his mind.

He was a quarter of a mile up Mount Colden when he almost stopped. It was that mash that did it, that fragrant hiker’s mash of lingering wet leaves and an early spring mud. At one whiff of the stuff, he was 10 years old again, 10 and intoxicated, with all his teeth, totally uncompromised and easily delighted, easily sustained. He thought of his mother, his cousins, his childhood. He thought of nutballs and state fairs. Thinking, he almost stopped, and had he stopped no doubt there would have been more thinking. Leaves! The wonder of them. Their otherworldliness. The magic of their seasonal change. The sorrow of their falling to Earth. The child of 10 making piles to play in. He was tempted to stop and breathe it in, to indulge the memory of so many exquisite joys, but he knew that he would itemise all that had disappeared since then and that doing so he would shatter, so he kept going. At some point, they believe, he stepped off the trail.

He didn’t feel sick; a few twinges here and there, the odd headache. But he would vanish between two mountains as if between two separate dimensions before he would submit to being a rodent in a lab, or willingly waste away in a hospital bed. It was magical thinking. He hadn’t had sufficient time to think. He just needed to stop and think. He needed more time. But he kept walking. He could bring great thought to bear on all but his own problem. Where he was concerned, it was never so complicated. He would do what he would do. That, in a nutshell, in seven short, simple words, was it: he would do what he would do, just as his cousins, poor doomed boys, would do what they would do, no matter how reckless or how dumb.

Death came for the bush divers of Pine Hollow in reverse seniority, so that the youngest, Ronnie, had the shortest lifespan, while Richard, the eldest, lived the longest and was the last to die. Each brother had the brief and dubious honour of being the youngest living sibling before he, too, bit the dust. After Ronnie, it was Ryan’s turn. Ryan had not played it any safer, the big idiot, than his younger brother. He had joined the Air Force, then worked for an aviation concern out of Canada before piloting an experimental aircraft of his own design into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia.

The wisest of the four brothers, Rory seemed content for a time just raising his three kids and manufacturing his doohickeys for the US government. Then a framed photograph of the Red Arrows flying in formation over 12 clipper ships in the waters off Liverpool arrested him as he was leaving the Secretary of the Navy’s office one day, and the following year he skippered the Pine Hollow in its inaugural regatta. He was knocked overboard during a headsail change on the Seychelles to Durban leg of the 1993 round-theworld race and, after 37 minutes of submersion, could not be resuscitated. He was buried at sea the next day.

Poor Richard, his favourite, went the old-fashioned way: a bad ticker gone undetected, but with the added complication of having to get his mortal remains down from the International Space Station for proper memorialisation.

HE STOPPED — WOKE UP, THAT IS, as from a fugue state. Where was he? He could only remember some 30 or 40 minutes earlier having peeled back that first almost impenetrable layer of pine and stepping inside as if into a fairy tale. With 10 or 20 more steps, he would come to a magical clearing, or reach some shimmering threshold where one dimension gave way to the next, and with one final step he would… disappear.

But there was no clearing. There was just pine and more pine. As moss covers a stone, the western face of Mount Colden was blanketed with short, spiny trees. Stalks of corn could not have been more closely packed together. To make any sort of forward progress, he had to part their boughs with his hands. And each bough was a spring-loaded trap primed for his face, his eyes. His

lower body, to which he was impossibly tree-blind, was getting all scratched up. His stinging shins had a pulse of their own. He turned around at once, but rather than spitting him out, as he had hoped, that decision only served to drive him deeper into confusion. He realised now, some 60 years too late, that he was every bit as dumb as his four cousins, and very likely a good deal dumber.

He had spent the last few hours as he had lived his life, not in careful, reasoned deliberation, as he liked to flatter himself, but in rote, brute motion, spurred on by fear and the most fantastical hope for pain-free resolution from a world that was suffering through and through. He sought it in the classroom, he sought it in the lecture hall, and now he sought it in the forest. It wasn’t just death and the fear of death he fled, but the animal body itself, the meat of him, the worm he carried around in his gut, the pond creature that passed for his teeth, the desperate naked form too shy and ashamed of its appetite to ever seek out satisfaction. He wished to be pure mind when, all along, he was a body and nothing more. The rest was delusion. Those boys from Pine Hollow were born geniuses. They had embraced their fate as dying creatures, while Henry Carmichael had run from it. He was running still.

He resolved at once to go back, call Cedarbaum, and live out his final days with the courage of his cousins.

He figured he had to be somewhere below the tree line that is a defining feature of a distant mountain when viewed from base camp or a passing car. Nearer at hand, it was unbelievably dense, the canopy above admitting only the faintest light. What sunlight did penetrate was quickly fading from the sky. It was getting colder. He had failed to register at the trailhead, and only now did he remember how, in his haste, he hadn’t bothered to take his bag. He began to shiver. No one knew where he was.

THEN, A SOUND. he stood suddenly very still, listening. Something was crashing, like him, slowly through the unyielding thicket. It raised the hair on the back of his neck. The trees ahead rustled, the branches snapped, the deadfall kicked up at the urging of something large and lumbering. Carmichael knew it could only be a bear.

So he would not die of cancer, after all. He would be mauled to death by a bear. Was that an improvement? He didn’t dare to move. His heart pounded in his ears as the animal drew closer. So this was how it would end, eh? A hundred times dumber and more gruesome than his four cousins combined.

It was a cow. A common dairy cow. It broke through the thick cover with its long snout, took one look at Carmichael, who laughed, and lowed deep and mournful. Carmichael laughed some more. He couldn’t help it. A cow! But quickly he saw how distressed the poor thing was. He was relieved it wasn’t a bear. And he was amused by the absurdity of encountering a dairy cow in a pine forest halfway up a mountain. It seemed every bit as unhappy as he was at having to negotiate a path through that unrelenting stuff. It looked at him as if for some brilliant suggestion, or at least a helping hand.

“Hello, you beast,” Carmichael said. “You’re a long way from home.”

It lowed again, a terrible melancholy sound, which it made while craning its long snout. Carmichael placed a hand under its chin and another on top of its head just beyond the bony declivity of its skull and its large eyes. It momentarily stopped mooing, as if in response to Carmichael’s touch, and in that instant, he understood that the cow was his mother. He simply knew it for a fact. It was Grandma Perkins, maker of pies and kettle corn. His mother had died of diabetes and heart failure, addled, obese and betrayed in the end by a steady diet of bad food and state fairs — it was all there in the sheer bulk of the beast and the mute pleading of its eyes.

“Ma?” he said.

The cow mooed.

He saw at once, too, that while it was his mother standing there, it was so much more. His fleeting childhood was contained within that hidebound beast: the candies and fruit pies, the smell of rain, the magic of new days, the woods behind his house. Later developments were also there: school and Bach, Carnap and Berlin. All of philosophy, all of the cleverest human deliberation, and all that was delicate, and all that was playful, and all that was beautiful and worthy was lodged and had always been lodged in a frail lowing animal that roamed the mountainside without aim or destination, fragile in spite of appearance and subject to time. There was no getting around it. All of life was a vile body. He took one more look at the beast and began to weep.

“If you are my mother,” he said to it — or thought at it, rather, trying to communicate with the animal telepathically, his hands still on its head — “blink twice now and I will not part from you. I will lead you down this hill if it means my life, for I miss you, Ma. I miss your sweets, I miss your kindness, I miss the childhood you gave me and I forgive you its errors and limits, for those were the spellbound years, when the delights came one after another, ceaselessly.”

But the cow, who was not his mother, did not blink.

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