Giles Goat-Boy or The Revised New Syllabus

John Barth

Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!

Something I don't understand is this, I said carefully. How can a person stand it, not to be...marvelous?

Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics; failed husbands, fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls--none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!
It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabus is published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not eh medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor--who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!
Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him; we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on; the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a false face to scare us away. We had asked for revelations; he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."
And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the engineer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.
Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it; call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it; I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position in this house.

However I was not supposed to infer that because all lenses distorted ("Your own included" he said, perhaps unable to see that I wore none), nothing could be truly seen; all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate.

Giles Goat-Boy, in addition to everything else, is about lenses. If you understand the last quote about lenses, you grasp as much of Giles Goat-Boy as is possible. We'll dismantle it: All lenses do distort. It is the nature of lenses. Is it the nature of sight? Do we distort things in order to see them? Is the conversion of photons into the visual imagery we have in our minds distortion?
Your own included.
perhaps unable to see that I wore none.
Does the boy wear a lens? Barth phrases it very carefully, and only in terms of sight. "Unable to see that I wore none." What lens could make the sight of other lenses impossible? What lens could make you see lenses where there aren't any?
We are presented with two possibilities: either the boy is wearing a lens and cannot see his own lens and the old man speaking can see his lens or the old man's lens is distorted and he truly cannot see that the boy is not wearing a lens.
Is this getting to be a bit much what with all the lenses and wearings and distortions? Maybe you should switch to a new pair of glasses. I guarantee there is one pair out there that will make what I'm saying here sound like pure genius. There are also pairs to make you think it's drivel, ludicrous, foolishness, insanity, wisdom, common sense, nothing special, everything special...
The calibration of these delicate little things we call eyes (which are nothing less than lenses) is a process we have had very little to do with on the overt level.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

I hope there are others also who don't mind trees.

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

The storm came on a wild horse and rode over us.

Actually, I was feeling lordly with love and several times broke into laughter that I can't explain otherwise, but he could have thought I was trying to be brace about having made a mess of my life.

Woman, I asked, can't I love you without liking him?
She just stood looking at me, so I went on talking and saying more than I had intended. I said things she already knew, but possibly one thing she wanted to hear again. Jessie, I said, you know I don't know any card tricks. I don't like him. I never will. But I love you. Don't keep testing me, though, by giving me no choices. Jessie, don't let him...I stopped from going on because I knew I should have found a shorter way to say what I had already said.
Don't let him what? She asked. What were you going to say?
I can't remember what I was going to say, I replied, except that I feel I have lost touch with you.

He tried to tell me. He spoke in the abstract, but he had spent his life fitting abstractions to listeners so that listeners would have no trouble fitting his abstractions to the particulars of their lives.
You are too young to help anybody and I am too old, he said. By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
Help, he said, is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
So it is, he said, using an old homiletic transition, that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, Sorry we are just out of that part.
I told him, You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big.

All there is to thinking, he said, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

Then he told me, In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that's right. I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.

He almost reached the door then turned back for reassurance. Are you sure that the bones in his hand were broken? he asked. I repeated, Nearly all the bones in his hand were broken. In which hand? he asked. In his right hand, I answered.

Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.

You like to tell true stories, don't you? he asked, and I answered, Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.
Then he asked, After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?
Only then will you understand what happened and why.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. One some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.

In his preface to A River Runs Through It, Maclean said his story was a story full of trees. This is true. There are quite a few trees in A River Runs Through It. There are more bushes and brush, and even more fish. But I think what he meant was that his story was full of people who are trees. Norman and Paul and their father, Jessie and her brother, the mother, Old Rawhide and Paul's Cherokee girlfriend, these people are not so much characters as they are trees. Rooted deep in the land, they reach with many branches waving in the wind for things they see and hear. To go places and see what may be seen or visited, but the roots...
Maclean's tree people are towering. Old trees with long histories--the rings are what make them, not the height of their highest branches nor the width of their trunks. And the rings are like the words that run under water. The rings are like the Word that was there in the beginning. The rings are the words written by Maclean on his pages. The rings are these words.
The problems of A River Runs Through It startled me. I was expecting a story about fishing with problems no greater than a lack of fish or inner turmoil (about the same level of gravity). But all the trees in A River Runs Through It are on fire. They are burning down in terrible heat, they are scorched, they are turning to ash, solid ash, before eyes (yours, mine, Maclean's). How could this surprise me? Trees grow tall to catch the wind and be broken, or taller still so they may attract lightning and be twisted. Trees grow to fall. We live to die.
This isn't meant to be morbid. All life is climbing a cliff to jump off. The higher you climb while you are alive, the better the jump is going to be. Death is no end; it's the most exciting thing you'll do with your life--provided you climb high while you're here.
The waters we all will dive into are the waters that haunt us.

Coast of Utopia

Tom Stoppard

I didn't mean any meaning!

No, not at all! Kolya's life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but we think there is something wrong with this picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and willfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is the proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. (pause) What happened to you, Michael? Were you betrayed?

Lost objects from another life are restored to you in the belly of a carp.

Wir haben der welt eau de cologne und Goethe geschenkt.

But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way towards it, we won't be grown up as human beings. Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.

I could write amazing things in a dressing gown like that.

Then what is the shadow on the wall of the cave?
That is philosophy.

Of course I am an egoist! How strange people are! taking pride in humility...in servitude...and the whole system of obedience designed to keep us quiet and as little different from each other as possible...Why should we damp down everything in us which is our uniqueness, the tiny furnace which needs to be constantly fed with self-esteem to keep us warm and vital and worth loving! Egoism isn't the enemy of love! It's what love feeds on. That's why without you I'd be destroyed.

Ty nye patseloóyesh minyá?

The Beggar remains.

Don't have much to say to this one. I think the last quote pretty much sums it up and if it doesn't perhaps the second to last does. Good luck, go start a revolution.

The Brothers K

David James Duncan

Only the unwritten can truly live life.
So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.

In what you might call the missionary position, Joon prayed for days and days. He damaged his knees. He wept with longing. Lord! Show me the way! he cried until his voice left him. And do you know what finally happened? Nothing! Joon grew exhausted, fell asleep, and the Lord showed him nothing!

But this was only life in the streets. It was when he'd return "home" to his featureless motel room that his new featurelessness grew truly aggressive, for it was here that he was forced to keep company with the disgustingly innocent looking, bald-faced, boyish stranger who, according to the mirror anyway, was none other than himself. Could he really be this twitchy little shit who couldn't sit still in a chair, couldn't read anything longer than a magazine article without half falling to sleep, couldn't fully fall to sleep without getting drunk, couldn't do anything without talking to himself, justifying himself, narrating his life to himself, trying to cast himself in a thousand increasingly empty, soap-operatic, politically or sexually heroic roles? Had revolution revolutionized him so little?

Huh, our hero replied, long after she'd blammed down the receiver.

Men from small dark worlds like Stove Land almost always offend women, because there is no gender or domesticity down there. Women and children are welcome in Stove Land, but for the same reason that men are welcome: to work on the stoves.

Industry had gone. It had lasted 1/267th as long as the Indian village.

Muskrat burgers are the greatest joy of my life.

O thing that consoles.
How clumsily I thank you.

Allow me to preface this grim revelation by describing a syndrome unknown to most women, but nightmarishly familiar to a great many men: struggle though we do to "grow up," millions of us American males spend our entire adult lives involuntarily blundering into slightly revamped but clearly recognizable replays of the same tedious inabilities and fears, the same pedestrian self-conceptions and the same uncorrectable limitations we first experienced during our boyhood baseball careers. To fully understand the nightmarishness of these karmic recrudescences it's important to bear in mind that, unless we happen to be major leaguers at the moment, our baseball careers invariably went up in some form of flames. It's also crucial to note that there is no simple escape: those who had no boyhood baseball career often spend their manhood reliving, repressing or rationalizing this lack.

This whole outing, Everett said, when he found his voice, my whole purpose in life today, Dom, is to go home alone, and to make this lasagna myself.

Telephones are, without question, useful devices. But are also, it seems to me, the verbal equivalent of houses without toilets. Telephones allow minds to communicate with minds (or tongues with ears, at least) in clarity or turmoil, in semisomnolence or drunkenness, in lust, joy, hysteria, stupefaction or any other state that fails to render a human physically incapable of holding up a quarter pound chunk of perforated plastic--which is most every state there is. That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it's also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That's why, until they're equipped with some sort of flush or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I'll not trust the things.

Even God is afraid of the naked

But this place makes me vulnerable to you, and crazy for you, in ways I can't describe or control. I mean, I'm trying to resist you this very moment, I'm trying to sound guarded and dispassionate here! but your letter tore me so far open so fast that I can hardly keep from scrawling I love you I love you I love you till I run out of ink. And it's terrifying, being this open in a place like this. That's what I'm saying. Because if I anchor my heart on you again, and fall madly in love with Myshkin too, and if you then vanish, I just couldn't bear it. Not here. If it didn't just kill me, I know it would turn me into a scalded, twisted something we wouldn't want to know. So consult your heart, Tasha. That's what I'm asking. Read all the tea leaves before you write back to me. Remember my temper, my big mouth, all our differences, "touchy, touchy" Remember I'll be an ex-con once I'm out of here, making ex-con money for life. Remember the beautiful parts too, if your hearts seems to want to. But don't "feel sorry for me" or try to make up for last winter. Don't "be nice" I beg you. Say "I can" if you can wait for me--and know that I'm overjoyed to be Myshkin's father. But say "I can't" if you can't. If it's ever going to come, let the end come now. And then, for both our sakes and Myshkin's, never write to me again.

Ma. Prem se bhiksha dijiye.

Christianity rarely gets such deep probing. When I was reading The Brothers K, I couldn't help but think that Duncan was the most Christian thinker I had read in quite some time. But at the same time he doesn't sound like many of the Christian thinkers you hear about today. I don't know what to do with him.
The Brothers K will tear your heart to shreds. Bad, I mean really horrible things, happen to people, especially people worth loving. Did you bat your eye? Please say you did. Alyosha reincarnate is Irwin and a Vietnam veteran who beat the living shit out of a man with a toothpaste tube. For this the world comes crashing down upon his head, well, perhaps it's more accurate to say two rifle butts do.
Duncan centers his story around a prayer. A dangerous and terrible prayer. A son prays that he may take a heavy burden from his father's shoulders. Duncan doesn't claim to have the prayer answered, but judge for yourself by the story: God answers even those most terrible prayers. Jesus took our burdens, hugged them tight and fell from the cross with them so they could be buried and we could walk upright. But what happens when a simple man asks for this? What happens when God grants it?
After dipping into Duncan's mind, I am wondering if the meaning of life cannot actually be found by moving to some small island in the San Juans and waiting for a mystical appearance of a bear to wash you away in torrents of rain. Or maybe I just have to fall down in a field of fresh buttercups and wait for them to crane away towards some new sun (actually the old sun is perfectly fine, I wanted to sound more poetic than I am).
Can life really be like a book?
Mother. What you offer with love, I accept.