Read Mr. Potter for Free Online

made? When he had been a little boy he had sat next to a man who made boats and watched that man do so. And those oars, how did he come to know the way in which they should be carved? When he sat next to the man who built the boats, Nathaniel watched as he made oars. And that fishing net, how did he come to know the ways of making it and repairing any rent in it? That same man who built the boat and made the oars had been a fisherman also and he knew how to make fish pots and how to make a fishing net, and Nathaniel had sat next to him and watched him do all those things, for Nathaniel then was just a boy and that fisherman was his father. And his father taught him how to do all the things that would eventually shape his life, for Nathaniel became a fisherman also. But his father did not teach him how to make children and his father could not teach him how to make children who could read and write.
    And when Nathaniel became a fisherman, that is to say, a man who went out to sea in the deep dark of late night and the thinning dark of early morning to catch fish, he no longer thought of his father or anyone
who came before him. His life was his own and it appeared to him, his life, as itself, not like another life, it came to him without a reference to anything and he was only himself and he was made up of nothing else. And if someone came upon him then, he could not give an account of himself, not even one that began with “I was born …” for he no longer had an interest in when he came into the world. But he was born in the way that all people are born and he was conceived in the way all people are conceived: no one enters the world in the exact same situation.
    Oh, memory so fresh, so not! Oh, memory so reliable, so not! His skin, protecting him from the elements outside, protecting him from the emotions inside! The future unimaginable, the past so impossible! The skin had not yet separated from Nathaniel Potter’s flesh and bones! He was still young.
    And Nathaniel Potter walked to the edge of the land and stepped into his boat and sailed to the edge of the sea as he knew it and cast his net and gathered all that was caught in it; and found his fish pots and gathered up all that had been caught in them and he returned to the edge of the land where it met the sea and he was disappointed, for he had caught only a few fish; how alone he felt in his disappointment. What is the glory of the world? He was so much a part of the glory of the world and he could not see himself. Naked at all times, no matter what covered his body,
that was Nathaniel Potter. The sun fell into the black before him; the moon rose up from the black behind him: and in between was history, all that had happened, and at its end was a man named Nathaniel Potter and who was only that, Nathaniel Potter. And he asked himself … What? He asked himself, not a thing; not why did this go in that way and something else in another. He grew too large for his shirt and his pants and then after that he became small again, not the way he had been as a boy, he only shrunk from his large manly self, and then he was the size of a boy, but he was not a boy again. And love could have entered into his existence and love, very much so, should have entered into his existence, for almost no one needed it more, but love did not become part of Nathaniel Potter’s existence. So unloved he was, but he did not know it and so he could not miss love, for it had never been part of his very being.
    And the world lay not before him and not behind him. He stood on the very ground that made up his world and nothing was lost and nothing was gained and then again everything was lost forever and ever. One day when he went to his fish pots, they were filled with nothing, and on that day he needed them to be filled with fish. And one day when he cast his net, he caught nothing, not even the stray piece of rubbish produced by the land or by the sea. And at first he was