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the screens, attended by the one fatal nurse of the ego. His researches have been rapidly making a wreck of him. Complex, inhibition, fetish, trauma—the whole merde-ridden terminology of the new psychology hangs from his lower lip, like a cigarette in the mouth of a chain smoker. “One must explore oneself, don’t you think? One must try and reduce one’s life to some sort of order, don’t you think? What do you think of Catholicism, Gregory? Sometimes I get such a feeling of devotion—it’s like being in love, sort of raped by contemplation. Does Lobo know anything? I must ask him. I used to faint at one time, and have dreams or visions, what would you call them? Trauma, it seems like according to the books. Real fits, like epilepsy, what do you say? Eh?” And so on. The terminologies of theology and psychology running neck and neck, each outdoing the other in vagueness. Duns Scotus and Freud. Adler and Augustine.
    â€œI suppose one really ought to read the best books,” he says hopelessly. “One must cultivate one’s garden like who was it said? One’s taste and all that. But that damned Iliad, Gregory, honestly I can’t get on with it. And pictures, too. Christ, I look at them, but it doesn’t mean more than what’s there. I don’t feel them.”
    Every now and then he has a syphilis scare, and off he trots to the hospital to have a blood test. The vagueness of the Wassermann torments him. One can never be certain, can one? Standing naked beside his bed he whacks away at his reflexes with a rubber truncheon; closes his eyes and finds that, standing with his feet together, he does not fall. Or he will pace up and down the floor, pausing to examine the microphotographs of spirochetes which hang over his cottage piano. Why is his chest spotty? Why is he always so run down? Is it lack of calcium or what?
    Everthing is plausible here, because nothing is real. Forgive me. The barriers of the explored world, the divisions, the corridors, the memories—they sweep down on us in a catharsis of misery, riving us. I am like a child left alone in these corridors, these avenues of sleeping doors among the statuary, with no friends but an audience of yawning boots. I am being honest with you for once, I, Death Gregory, the monkey on the stick. If I were to prick out my history for you, as Lobo his plans on the mature parchment, would you be able to comprehend for an instant the significance of the act? I doubt it. In the field of history we all share the irrelevance of painted things. I have only this portion of time in which to suffer.
    The realms of history, then! The fact magical, the fancy wonderful, the fact treasonable. All filtered, limited, through the wretched instruments of the self. The seventy million I’s whose focus embraces these phenomena and records them on the plate of the mind. The singularity of the world would be inspiriting if one did not feel there was a catch in it. When I was nine the haggard female guardian in whose care I had been left exclaimed: “Horses sweat, Herbert. Gentlemen perspire. Don’t say that nasty word any more.” I shall never forget the phrase; it will remain with me until I die—along with that other useless and ineradicable lumber—the proverbs, practices, and precepts of a dead life in a dead land. It is, after all, the one permanent thing, the one unchanging milestone on the climb. It is I who change; constant, like a landmark of the locality, the lumber remains. Like a lake seen from different altitudes during a journey, its position never varying: only its aspect altering in relation to my own place on the landscape. I think that what we are to be is decided for us in the first few years of life; what we gain afterwards in the way of reason, adjustment, etc., is superficial: a veneer, which only aggravates our disorders. Perish the wise, the seekers after reason. I am that I am. The treasonable