Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

worry, I’ve thought it through! It may be that—” He paused, swallowed, then forced himself on, slightly sneering: “It may be that certain individual philosophers are not what they ought to be“—he gave Mickelsson what might or might not be an accusing look—”but philosophy itself per se is the highest activity known to man, and certain individual philosophers, at least—” He broke off to get back control of his voice, then continued as if angrily, “I don’t mean to fawn or anything, but I know how you live, I know how much—” Again he was forced to break off.

Mickelsson sat perfectly still, dreadful revelation spreading through him. Was it worship, then, that made Nugent stare? He said rather sharply, “It sounds to me like what you’re looking for is religion. You know how Kant described philosophy? One man holding the sieve while the other milks the he-goat.’“

Nugent said nothing, simply went on staring at him, blinking.

Mickelsson’s scalp tingled unpleasantly. He cleared his throat and sat forward, laying the pipe aside with finality, shot his cuffs, then picked up his pencil and scowled at the notes on the pad. “I’d definitely recommend that you take Lawler’s Aquinas,” he said, businesslike, conscious that he was blushing a little, “and Tillson’s Introduction to Logic.” He underlined them, then put brackets around them. “As for the Plato-Aristotle course—” The hand holding the pencil gave a tight little wave, dismissive.

“Maybe I could get the book and read into it a little, before the semester starts. If you could give me the title—”

Mickelsson scowled harder, every nerve alert, like a diver in the presence of large, groping tentacles, then abruptly gave way and wrote down the title of the course, the time and place, and the two required texts. “It’s two titles, actually,” he said. He erased the crossed l in Plato and retouched the loop. Then he said, glancing at Nugent, “I see you haven’t taken any Greek.” He said it for no honorable reason, simply to throw a small impediment in the way of the young man’s devouring earnestness.

“Not yet,” Nugent said, and looked uneasy.

“Let’s put you down for Greek, then.” Neatly, pressing firmly, he wrote down Greek 101, M.W.F., 4-5 p.m., Rm. 226 Lib. N. (Levin).

“I want to thank you for this,” Nugent said, his voice husky, his body pale and motionless, eyelids rapidly blinking.

“It’s nothing, believe me,” Mickelsson said, and glanced at his watch.

That afternoon he began his house-hunting.

In the beginning his premise was that buying was impossible, he was looking only for a place to rent. He had nothing, not a penny, with which to make a down payment, and even if he did by some miracle find money, chances were, if he bought a place, the I.R.S. would swoop in on him and snatch it. He’d never made up to them the money his ex-wife had “borrowed” from his tax account three years ago, nor had he paid his taxes for the last two years; in fact, until his lawyer had broken his daze with hell-fire warnings, he’d been too depressed and disorganized to file. But when Mickelsson had looked for houses for a week, finding nothing that would do—tarpaper shacks, falling-down cottages on still, gloomy lakes, low-ceilinged dungeons of cinderblock, one uninsulated, half-converted barn—nothing, nothing, and no prospects ahead (realtors were so uninterested in rental property he could hardly get them to drive out with him and look), he began to have second thoughts.

There was, in fact, one place where he could get a few thousand. He’d started, some years ago, a small account he’d be able to draw on if his mother should need a nursing home. It seemed unlikely that she would, given her spirit and her evident happiness where she was, with relatives in Wisconsin; but one never knew. Now, uncomfortably, disliking himself for it, he began to think about turning to that account. It was not as if his mother were destitute—she was, one might say, better off than he was. And the I.R.S. could as easily snatch his mother’s money (as he’d always thought of it) as it could snatch a house. Besides, what would it gain them, snatching a shabby little farmhouse he had practically no money in? Soon he’d settled on flight to a house of his own as if the matter were out of his hands, blind destiny. No use worrying, he told himself; the “examined life” was easily overrated.

Now he began to hunt with considerable intensity, pulling together all his powers of concentration, poring over booklets and brochures, burrowing through newspapers, writing himself notes in his Pocket Calendar and Daily Reminder, then hurrying from one end of the county to the other to poke through damp cellars, bump his head on attic beams, wipe and shake sticky cobwebs from his fingers, blush, apologize, and back away (“Thank you, I’ll call you, yes good, good, thank you”—cringing inwardly, with each exaggerated bow, at his moral cowardice), even now finding nothing that would do, nothing but termite-fodder, overpriced trash.

He did not like that increasing tendency to lie to himself and others—“I’ll call you, yes good.” An existentialist, of course, could defend it without a blink; another kind of thinker could argue its rightness in a community of liars; another might assert its suitability to a stock behavioral mode voluntarily elected; but Mickelsson—glowering with rage turned inward, fists clamped tight on the steeringwheel—had never been friendly to the notion that human beings are free to turn into tomato plants at will, or even to the best utilitarianism, and least of all to R. M. Hare’s opinion, Oxonian and therefore unassailable, that morality is life-style. He wouldn’t have denied, if anyone other than his psychiatrist had asked him, that his search had all the earmarks of a mad compulsion, though of course one could always manufacture fine theories, delimiting categories, obs and sols.

“Perhaps,” he’d said on the phone to Dr. Rifkin, back in Providence, “where I live is the only thing left that I