The Shadow Knows
Page 6
*Cambridge*
Could Kesey have been partially correct? Is it all really true even if it never happened? In a sense, of course, there’s no doubt about it, but the drug generalization is often notoriously unreliable. He tried to concentrate for a moment on the present, on the worlds he was being asked to choose between, and he found it to be no simple task. The past was not always just baggage you dragged along with you into the present, hoping it wouldn’t trip you up or give you a hernia; sometimes it was the very essence of that existence, the two as inseparable as the Siamese twins who share the same vital organs and who will cease to exist if torn asunder, and sometimes the past was all that was left with which you could determine the future. If you brought with you into the here and now only those things you found pleasant or at least bearable, wasn’t it all a lie, an illusion, and weren’t you just deceiving yourself? The past then would be a palatable fiction, a world wholly created in your own image and designed to ease you through the present and to give you a chance at having a future.
He felt uneasy at the thought, but he recognized how relevant it often was to his own situation. Perhaps he found himself where he was partly because he’d always remembered only the good things about those early student days on the hill, relegating, without apparent effort, the tedious and the unpleasant to the fuzzy realm of the subconscious. He could always recall sledding down the library slope in the bitter cold of winter on food trays taken from the Willard Straight cafeteria and watching the crew practice in the inlet of the lake in the warm days of spring; he never seemed to forget the Saturday morning folksong class called Romp and Stomp with Yarrow popping guitar strings as he accompanied several hundred out-of-tune voices, of the evenings at Johnny’s Big Red Grill with Farina being nasty and charming simultaneously and Pynchon quietly eyeing the girl in the green knee socks who sat next to him for a whole semester in Rossiter’s American Presidency class and always said hello, or the jazz sessions with Art Mack and Ziegman and the St. Patrick’s Day dragon winding its green way from the architecture school to Goldwin Smith every year and the eerie blackness of Nabokov’s wife as she sat impassively facing them at all of his classes and -- and so much more. Maybe, though, after all these years, he could finally put some of it in perspective. At least he now recalled that Farina and Nabokov were dead, as was Rossiter, who took his own life. Perhaps he’d come far enough for a more balanced assessment; at least he had a good reason now for making the attempt.