Smith

Chapter 1-2

After the first few weeks he had little trouble with the science subjects; there was so much to do, so many things to remember. The study of soil chemistry aroused his general interest; it had never occurred to him that the brownish nuggets he had been working with for most of his life were anything other than what they appeared to be, and he was beginning to vaguely realize that his growing knowledge of them could be useful when he returned to his farm. But the required perusal of English literature troubled and troubled him like nothing before.

The instructor was a middle-aged man in his early fifties; his name was

Bowman Quinn, and he approached his teaching with an apparent disdain and contempt, as if he perceived a chasm so wide between what he knew and what he could say that he would not bother to bridge it. He was feared and disliked by most of his students, and he responded with distant, wry amusement. He was a man of medium height, with a long, lined face, clean-shaven; he had the impatient gesture of running his fingers through his mop of gray curly hair. His voice was flat and dry, and it came without expression or intonation through barely moving lips; but his long thin fingers moved with Doris and persuasion, as if giving the words a form his voice could not.

Away from the classroom, doing his chores on the farm or squinting into the dim lamplight in his windowless attic room, Smith was often aware that the image of this man had popped up in his mind's eye. He had trouble imagining the face of another of his teachers or remembering something very specific about another of his classes; but always on the threshold of his consciousness waited the figure of Bowman Quinn, and his dry voice, and his scornful, casual words about a passage from Beowulf or a couplet from Chaucer.

He found he couldn't complete the survey like his other courses. Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and their influences, he nearly failed his first exam; and he did little better on his second. He read and reviewed his literature assignments so often that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words upon pages, and he could not see the use of what he was doing.

And he thought about the words Bowman Quinn spoke in class as if beneath their flat, dry meaning he might find some clue that would lead him where he was going; he bent over the desk in a chair too small to hold comfortably, clinging to the edges of the desk so tight his knuckles were white against his brown hard skin; he frowned and bit his bottom lip. But as Smith and his classmates' attention grew more desperate, Bowman's contempt for Quinn became irresistible. And once that contempt exploded into anger and was directed solely at John Smith.

The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and ended the week studying the sonnets. The students were nervous and confused, half-startled by the tension building between them and the hunched figure watching them from behind the lectern. Quinn had read them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes darted around the room and his lips curled into a humorless smile.

"What does the sonnet mean?" he asked abruptly, pausing, his eyes scanning the room with a grim and almost contented hopelessness. "Mr. Wilbur?" There was no answer. "Mr. Schmidt?" Someone coughed. Quinn turned his dark, light eyes on Smith. "Mr. Smith, what does the sonnet mean?"

Smith swallowed and tried to open his mouth.

'It is a sonnet, Mr Smith,' said Quinn dryly, 'a fourteen-line poetic composition in a particular pattern which I am sure you have memorized. It's written in English, which I think you've been speaking for a number of years. Its author is John Shakespeare, a poet who is dead but who nevertheless occupies an important place in the minds of a few." He continued to stare at Smith for a moment, and then his eyes went blank as she became invisible beyond the class fixed. Without looking at his book, he recited the poem; and his voice became deeper and softer, as if the words and tones and rhythms had become himself for a moment: "You can see this time of year in me, when yellow leaves or none or few are hanging on these branches, those against it shiver the cold, mere ruin d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me you see the twilight of such a day

As the west fades after sunset;

Which gradually takes away the black night, Death's second self, which seals everything in silence.

In me you see such fire glowing that lies on the ashes of his youth,

Like the deathbed on which it must perish, consumed by what it was nourished on.

You realize what makes your love stronger

To love what you will soon have to leave." In a moment of silence, someone cleared their throat. Quinn repeated the lines, his voice flat again, his own again. "You perceive that what makes your love stronger, To love this well you must soon leave." Quinn's eyes returned to John Smith and he said dryly, "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you for three hundred years, Mr. Smith; do you hear him?"

John Smith realized he had been holding his breath for several moments. He let it out gently, aware of the movement of his clothes on his body as his breath left his lungs. He looked away from Quinn across the room. Light fell obliquely from the windows and fell on the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from them and went out against a twilight; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell on a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Smith became aware of his fingers loosening their hard grip on his desktop. He turned his hands under his gaze, marveling at her tan, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt fingertips; he mean,

Quinn spoke again. "What is he saying to you, Mr Smith? What does his sonnet mean?"

Smith's eyes rose slowly and reluctantly. "That is," he said, raising his hands in the air with a small movement; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the form of Bowman Quinn. "That is," he said again, unable to finish what he had started to say.

Quinn looked at him curiously. Then he nodded abruptly and said, "Class is dismissed." Without looking at anyone, he turned and left the room.

John Smith was barely aware of the students around him, who grumbled and muttered from their seats and shuffled out of the room. After they left, he sat motionless for a few minutes, staring ahead at the narrow floorboards worn bare by the restless feet of students he would never see or know. He slid his own feet across the floor, hearing the dry rustle of wood on his soles and feeling the roughness through the leather. Then he got up and walked slowly out of the room.

The thin chill of the late autumn day cut through his clothes. He looked around, at the bare, gnarled branches of the trees that rippled and twisted against the pale sky. Students hurrying across campus to their classes brushed it; he heard the murmur of their voices and the clatter of their heels on the stone paths and saw their faces, flushed from the cold, bent down against a gentle breeze. He looked at them curiously as if he had never seen them before, feeling very far from them and very close to them. He captured the feeling that he had rushed to his next class, and held it through his soil chemistry professor's lecture, against the booming voice reciting things to be written in notebooks and remembered by a process of drudgery,

In the sophomore of that school year, John Smith dropped his foundation science courses and interrupted his Ag School sequence; he took introductory courses in philosophy and ancient history and two courses in English literature. In the summer he returned to the family farm and helped his father with the harvest and did not mention his work at the university. When he was much older, he would look back on his last two college years as if they were an unreal time belonging to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was accustomed, but in fits and starts begins. One moment was contrasted with yet isolated from the other, and he felt lost in time as he watched them run like a big,

He became aware of himself in a way he hadn't before. Sometimes he looked at himself in the mirror, looked at the long face with the shock of dry brown hair and touched his sharp cheekbones; he saw the thin wrists protruding inches from the sleeves of his coat; and he wondered if he seemed as ridiculous to others as he did to himself.

He had no plans for the future, and he never shared his insecurities with anyone. He continued to work for the Footes for his room and board, but he no longer worked the long hours of his first two years at the university. He let himself be used as Jim and Serena Foote wished for three hours every afternoon and half a day on weekends; he claimed the rest of the time for himself.

He spent part of this time in his little attic room above the Foote house; but as often as he could, after his classes were finished and his work at Footes done, he returned to the university. In the evenings he sometimes wandered about the long open courtyard among couples who walked together and murmured softly; even though he didn't know any of them and even though he didn't speak to them, he felt related to them. Sometimes he would stand in the center of the courtyard and gaze at the five huge pillars in front of Jesse Hall, jutting out of the cool grass into the night; he had learned that these pillars were the remains of the original main building of the university, which had been destroyed by fire many years before. Gray-silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to represent the way of life

In the university library, he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, breathing in the musty smell of leather, cloth, and drying pages as if it were some exotic incense.

Sometimes he would pause, pick a volume off the shelf and hold it for a moment in his large hands, which tingled at the still unfamiliar feel of spine and box and unresistant page. Then he flipped through the book, reading a paragraph here and there, his stiff fingers turning the pages cautiously as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they had taken so much trouble to uncover.

He had no friends and for the first time in his life he became aware of his loneliness. Sometimes, at night in his attic room, he would look up from a book he was reading and stare into the dark corners of his room where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and hard, the darkness would gather into a light that took on the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel like he was running out of time, like he had felt that day in class when Bowman Quinn had spoken to him. The past gathered from the darkness where it stayed, and the dead rose to live before it; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the living, so that for an intense moment he had a vision of density that he was condensed into and from which he could not and did not want to escape. Tristan, Iseult the Fair, went before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing darkness; Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly. Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly. Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly.