Giles Goat-Boy

Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher

Gentlemen:

The manuscript enclosed is not The Seeker, that novel I've been promising you for the past two years and on which you hold a contractual option. The Seeker is lost, I fear; no use to seek him, or any other novel from this pen: I and the Muse, who in any case had not cohabited these many months, are now divorced for good and all a vinculo matrimonii. The wonder is not that our alliance has ended, but that it lasted and produced at all, in the light of my wrong-headedness. I will not admit that it was a mistake to wed her; matrimony may be the death of passion, but need not be of production. The error (by no means my only one) was in believing anything could endure; that my or any programme could work. Nothing "works," in the sense we commonly hope for; a certain goat-boy has taught me that; everything only gets worse, gets worse; our victories are never more than moral, and always pyrrhic; in fact we know only more or less ruinous defeats.

Ah well, now I have caught Knowledge like a love-pox, I understand, not that my former power was a delusion, but that delusions may be full of power: Lady Fancy did become my mistress after all; did mother offspring that my innocent lust got on her — orphans now, but whose hard neglect may be the saving of them in the long run. Think it if you will a further innocence on my part; I stand convinced that she did by George love me while she loved me, and that what she loved was the very thing that ruined us in the end: I mean my epic unsophistication. And this because, contrary to appearance and common belief, she shares it herself; it is if not the essence of her spirit at least one among its chiefer qualities, and has much to do with that goldenness of hers. How else explain the peculiar radiance she maintains despite her past, a freshness as well of spirit as of complexion, which leads each new suitor to take her for a maiden girl? My ambition to husband her, exclusively and forever, as who should aspire to make a Hausfrau out of a love-goddess — do you think she indulged it as a joke, or tickled a jaded appetite by playing at homeliness? Very well: I choose to think the experiment pleased her as simply and ingenuously as it pleased me; we were equally distressed to see it fail, and whatever the fate of our progeny I believe she will remember as sweetly as I the joy of their getting…

No matter. I'm celibate now: a priest of Truth that was a monger after Beauty; no longer a Seeker but a humble Finder — all thanks to the extraordinary document here enclosed. I submit it to you neither as its author nor as agent for another in the usual sense, but as a disinterested servant of Our Culture, if you please: that recentest fair fungus in Time's watchglass. I know in advance what reservations you will have about the length of the thing, the controversial aspects of occasional passages, and even its accuracy here and there; yet whether regarded as "fact" or "fiction" the book's urgent pertinence should be as apparent as its considerable (if inconsistent and finally irrelevant) literary merit, and I'm confident of your final enthusiasm. "A wart on Miss University," as the Grand Tutor somewhere declares, "were nonetheless a wart, and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would I turn her out of bed on its account." There are warts enough on this Revised New Syllabus, artistic and it may be historical; but they are so to speak only skin-deep, and I think no publisher will turn it off his list on their account.

Indulge me now, as a useful introduction to the opus proper, the story of its origin and my coming by it. As you may know, like most of our authors these days I support myself by preaching what I practice. One grows used, in fiction-writing seminaries, to three chief categories of students: elder ladies and climacteric gentlemen who seek in writing an avocation which too might supplement their pensions; well-groomed and intelligent young literature-majors of various sexes who have a flair; and those intensely marginal souls — underdisciplined, oversensitive, disordered in both appearance and reality — whose huge craving for the state of artist-hood may drive them so far in rare instances as actually to work at making pieces of art. It was one of this third sort, I assumed, who came into my office on a gusty fall evening several terms ago with a box of typescript under his arm and a gleam in his face.

I'd not seen him before — but then, these bohemians appear and vanish like spooks, change their aspect at the merest whim (quite as does the creature called Harold Bray hereinafter), and have often the most tenuous connection with their Departments. Imagine a lean young man of twenty, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, almost a mulatto, but with a shag of bronze curls, unbarbered, on head and chin; even his eyebrows were like turnings of that metal. He wore battered workshoes laced with rawhide, nondescript trousers tucked at the ankles into boot-socks, and an outlandish fleecy jacket that in retrospect I'd guess he fashioned for himself — one may presently suppose of what material. Though he had no apparent limp, he affected a walkingstick as odd as the rest of his get-up: a three-foot post of white ash, somewhat stouter than a pick-shaft, it had what appeared to be folding lenses and other gadgetry attached here and there along its length, which was adorned with rude carvings (both intaglio and low-relief) of winged lingams, shelah-na-gigs, buckhorns, and domestic bunch-grapes.

Near the tip of this unprecedented tool was a small blunt hook wherewith my visitor first unstopped and closed the door, then smartly drew himself a chair out and sat him down at the desk next to mine. All this I remarked in two glances, and then to collect myself returned to that manuscript of my own at which I'd been tinkering when he entered. The fellow's dress, if extreme, was not unique — one may see as strange at any gathering of student artists, and I myself in disorderly moods will wear mungos and shoddies, though my preference is for the conventional. But your average bohemian's manner is shy as a kindergartener's with those he respects, and overweening with everyone else, while my caller's was neither: brisk, forthright, cordial, he plunked his paper-box onto my desk, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands at the cane-top, and rested his chin upon all, so that his striking beard hung over. Disconcerting as the grin he then waited my pleasure with was the cast of his features, not just like any I had seen. Such of his kind as had strayed into my office thitherto were either dark of beard, coal-eyed, and intense, after the model of a poet they admired, or else had hair the shade of wheatstraw, forget-me-not eyes, and the aspect and deportment of gelded fawns. Not so this chap: his bronze beard; his eyes not pale nor tormented but simply a-dance; his wiry musculature, the curl of his smile, even a positive small odor about his person that was neither of dirt or cologne — in a word, he was caprine: I vow the term came to mind before I'd ever spoken to him, much less read what he'd brought me. And that walking-stick, that instrument without parallel…

"Don't fear," he said directly — in a clear, almost a ringing voice, somewhat clickish in the stops. "I'm not a writer, and it's not a novel."

I was disarmed as much by the insouciance and timbre of his voice as by the words themselves. It sounded as though he actually meant what he said, sincerely and indifferently, as who should announce: "I'm not left-handed," or "I'm no clarinetist." And this I felt with the ruefuller twinge for its expressing, glibly as the verdict of a child, that fear no fiction is proof against, and which had dwelt a-haunt in my Fancy's garret for the twelve months past. I had just turned thirty; it was my seventh year of toil in the prevaricating art, and scant-rewarded for my labors I was weary as the Maker of us all on the seventh morning. Monday, I still trusted, would roll round; in the meanwhile I was writing so to speak a sabbatical-piece — that book you'll never see. I knew what novels were: The Seeker wasn't one. To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths — it bored me, I hadn't taste or gumption for it. Especially was I surfeited with movement, the without-which-not of story. One novel ago I'd hatched a plot as mattersome as any in the books, and drove a hundred characters through eight times that many pages of it; now the merest sophomore apprentice, how callow soever his art, outdid me in that particular. His inspirations? Crippled: but I sat awed before the bravery of their unfolding. His personae? Raw motors cursed with speech, ill-wrought as any neighbors of mine — but they blustered along like them as if alive, and I shook my head. Stories I'd set down before were children gone their ways; everything argued they'd amount to nothing; I scarcely recognized their faces. I was in short disengaged, not chocked or out of fuel but fretfully idling; the pages of my work accumulated to no end, all noise and no progress, like a racing motor. What comfort that in every other way my lot improved? House and gardens prospering, rank and income newly raised, my small fame spreading among the colleges — to a man whose Fancy is missing in action, all boons feel posthumous. The work before me (that I now put by, with a show of interruption): Where was its clutch, its purchase? Something was desperately wanting: a thing that mightn't be striven for, but must come giftlike and unsought; a windfall from orchards of the spirit, a voice from nowhere; a visitation. Indeed it was no novel… My heart turned sinking from the rest.

All I said was, "Oh?"

"My name is Stoker Giles," the young man announced. His head still was propped on the singular stick, and he continued to regard me with an uncalled-for look of delight. Perhaps I was intended to recognize the name, but my hold on such things was never firm. Especially of late, though I lectured with animation, indeed almost fervidly, I had sensed myself losing command of memory and attention. Information escaped me; I could not recall my telephone number, and missed my way on the most familiar campus paths. My family waited only for the day I should come home to some stranger's house; their teasing had given way to concern, concern to impatience, and impatience to a silent rancor, which though I perceived it I could not seem to engage.

I asked him whether he was a graduate student.

"Well, at least I'm a Graduate." His apparent amusement now positively irritated me, the more as it was not my place to draw his business out of him but his to state it. And then he mildly added, "I wonder if you are."

I think no one may accuse me of hauteur or superciliousness. In truth I reproach myself for being if anything over-timid, acquiescing too easily, suffering presumption to the point of unmanliness, and provoking contempt in my eagerness not to displease. But the man was impudent! I supposed he was referring to the doctoral degree; very well, I'd abandoned my efforts in that line years since, when I eloped with the muse. Moreover, I'd never pretended I had the memory and temper for scholarship, or even the intelligence: time and again I've followed some truly profound one to my limits and been obliged then to stand and watch, chin-high in the shallows, while he forged on past my depth. I was properly humble — and properly indifferent. To make is not the same as to think; there are more roads than one to the bottom of things.

"You'd better take that box and get out," I said. "I've got work to do."

"Yes," he said. "Yes indeed you do!" As though at last we understood each other! Then he spoke my name in the gentlest tone (he had, I should say, a curious accent that I couldn't place, but which sounded not native), and indicating my work-in-progress added, "But you know this isn't it. There's much to be done; you mustn't waste any more time." In the face of my anger his voice became businesslike and brisk, though still cheerful. "Nor must I," he declared. "Please listen now; I've read your books and understand them perfectly, and I've come a long way to see you. May I ask what you're calling this one?"

I was taken aback by a number of things. Not simply his presumption — I rather admired that, it recalled an assurance I once had myself and could wish for again; indeed he was so like a certain old memory of myself, and yet so foreign, even wild, I was put in mind of three dozen old stories wherein the hero meets his own reflection or is negotiated with by a personage from nether realms. Yet there was little of the Evil One about this chap, however much of the faun; it wouldn't have surprised me to see he had cloven hooves, but the reed-pipe, rather than the pitchfork, would be his instrument. I found myself so caught up in such reflections as these, and contrariwise arrested by the tiresomeness of succumbing to an image the fellow obviously strove to affect, that annoyance and perspective got lost in my confusion. I couldn't think how he should be dealt with; the situation was slipping my hold, disengaging from me as much else had lately seemed to do. For example, I'd forgotten my pills again, which I'd come to need regularly not to fall asleep over my work: that accounted for my present somnolence, no doubt. I told him that the book was to be called The Seeker — or perhaps The Amateur, I could not decide…

"Certainly." The pleasure with which he stroked his beard was plainly not at the excellence of my titles. "A seeker; an amateur: one who is a lover, so to speak, but not a knower; passionate naïf — am I right?"

Well, he was. Do you know, the great mistake we make in these encounters comes not at their end but here, at the very outset. The moment our mysterious caller comes to the door, or we recognize we've made a wrong turn somewhere and are in alien realms — then is when we should take instant, vigorous action: protest at once against the queerness of it, shut the door, close eyes and ears, and not for one second admit him. Another step down his road and there'll be no returning — let us stop where we are! Alas: Curiosity whispers to Better Judgment, "It's too late anyway," and we always go on.

"He's about thirty," my visitor supposed.

"Thirty-three, I guess."

"Thirty-three and four months? And I'm sure he has some affliction — something physical, that he was probably born with — is he a cripple?"

I hadn't thought of making my man a cripple, though it was true that he seldom left his quarters (in the top of a certain tower), preferring the company of his books and amateur scientific apparatus to that of his fellow men. "He's just nearsighted, is all," I said, "but he does have a port-wine birthmark on his temple — "

"Cancerous!" the stranger cried. "You'll make it turn out to be cancerous! Oh, that's very good. But shouldn't he have some sort of astigmatism instead of myopia?"

Ah, it was so right, so righter that the seeker's vision be twisted instead of merely blurred — and to make the birthmark incipiently cancerous, what a stroke that would be! For the first time in half a year I grew truly interested in my book. Putting reticence by, I outlined the plot to this remarkable visitor of mine, who displayed a keener grasp of my concerns than any critic or reviewer I'd read — keener, I smiled to suppose, than myself, who in recent months had come nearly to forgetting what was my vision of things.

"It's about love, as you say; but a very special kind. People talk about two sorts of love, you know, the kind that tries to escape the self and the kind that affirms the self. But it seems to me there's a third kind of love, that doesn't seek either union or communion with its object, but merely admires it from a position of utter detachment — what I call the Innocent Imagination." My hero, I explained, was to be a Cosmic Amateur; a man enchanted with history, geography, nature, the people around him — everything that is the case — because he saw its arbitrariness but couldn't understand or accept its finality. He would deal with reality like a book, a novel that he didn't write and wasn't a character in, but only an appreciative reader of; naturally he would assume that there were other novels, better ones and worse… But in truth, of course, he wasn't finally a spectator at all; he couldn't stay "out of it"; and the fiascos of his involvements with men and women — in particular the revelation of his single mortal fate — these things would make him at the end, if not an authentic person, at least an expert amateur, so to speak, who might aspire to a kind of honorary membership in the human fraternity.

"I think there's some heroism in that, don't you?" I was, in truth, never more enthusiastic about my story. It was a great conception after all, and little inspirations came as I spoke: the seeker must be not only astigmatic but addicted to lenses, telescopic and microscopic; the tower he lived in I would convert to a sort of huge camera obscura into which images of life outside were projected, ten times more luminous and interesting than the real thing — perfect, perfect! And my amateur of life would welcome and treasure his cancer, his admission-ticket to brotherhood…

But even as my enthusiasm grew, Stoker Giles shook his head.

"It's wrong, classmate." He even laid a hand on my arm — I can only say lovingly. And for all I saw pretty well he was playing to the hilt his role of clairvoyant, the touch moved me. And the laughing candor in those eyes, that exalted-imp's face (doubtless practiced in a mirror) — the wretch had a way with him! My quick disappointment gave way to lassitude, a sweet fatigue. It was wrong, of course; all I'd ever done was wrong. I had no hold on things. My every purchase on reality — as artist, teacher, lover, citizen, husband, friend — all were bizarre and wrong, a procession of hoaxes perhaps impressive for a time but ultimately ruinous. He couldn't know how deep his words went, almost to the wellsprings! Without for a moment accepting him as prophet (I knew all moods are retroactive, so that what he said would apply to anyone ripe for discontentment), I let myself acknowledge the mantic aspects of the situation. Throughout the rest of our interview, you must understand, there was this ambivalence: on the one hand I never lost sight of the likelihood that here was just another odd arts-student, even a lunatic, whose pronouncements were as generally pertinent as weighing-machine fortunes; on the other I was quite aware that it is the prophet who validates the prophecy, and not vice-versa — his authenticity lies not in what he says but in his manner and bearing, his every gesture, the whole embodiment of his personality. And in this salient respect (which I dwell upon because of its relevance to the manuscript he left me) Mr. Stoker Giles was effective indeed.

Calmly now he said, "You're like the man who gave my father a little lens once, that he claimed would show everything truly. Here it is…"

He flipped up a round concave lens near the head of his walking-stick and invited me to examine my manuscript through it. But the joke was, it was silvered on the back, and returned no image of my words at all, enlarged or reduced, only a magnified reflection of my eye. I felt myself blush, and blushed more to feel it.

He said, "You're going to fail. You've never been really and truly there, have you? And you've never finally owned to the fact of things. If I should suddenly pinch you now and you woke and saw that all of it was gone, that none of the things and people you'd known had been actually the case — you wouldn't be very much surprised."

Before I could reply he seized my arm and pinched the skin. I came out of the chair with a shout, batting at his hand, but could not shake him loose. "Wake up! Wake up!" he ordered, grinning at me. I found myself blinking and snorting out air. I did, I did with my whole heart yearn to shrug off the Dream and awake to an order of things — quite new and other! And it was not the first time.

He let go my arm and with his cane-hook retrieved my chair, which had got thrust away.

"It's beside the point that all the others are flunking too," he went on. "Don't you agree? The important thing is to pass; you must pass. And you've got a long way to go! Don't think it's just a matter of turning a corner, to reach Commencement Gate: you've got to become as a kindergartener again, or a new-dropped kid. If that weren't so, my dad wouldn't have said it. But you know this yourself." Again he touched my arm, this time mildly, where the angry pinch-mark flamed, and affection beamed in his look. "What a pleasing thing it is that you don't bring up all the old arguments! But that's the artist in you (which is real enough, even if your work is wrong). You know a man can't reason a piece of music into being; and to argue the fact of Graduation is like arguing the beauty of a melody, or a line of verse. Splendid of you not to bother. I knew you were the man."

I still felt very much shaken; but I could not resist pointing out that in any case he made a good argument against further argument. He threw back his bronze head to laugh, and then with a serious smile declared: "I love you, classmate." My apprehension must have showed, for he added with a chuckle, "Oh, not in that way! There isn't time, for one thing: we both have too much to do. You've got to enroll yourself in the New Curriculum and get yourself Graduated; then you've got to establish Gilesianism here, so that the others can pass the Finals too. And this isn't the only college in the University, you know, or the only University, for that matter. My work is cut out for me!"

In the very head of his stick a silver watch was set, facing upwards, which he now consulted. Among my other emotions I was beginning to feel disappointment: what an anticlimax it would be if he revealed himself not only as a crank but as a tiresome one!

All I could think to say was: "Gilesianism."

"It's the only Way," he said pleasantly. "They call us crazy men and frauds and subversives — I don't mind that, or the things they do to us; we'd be fools not to have expected it. What breaks my heart is seeing them all fail, when The Revised New Syllabus could show them how to pass."

I sighed. "You're from the Education School. You've thought up some gimmick for your dissertation, and I'm supposed to read through it and make suggestions about the prose, since you took the trouble to buy my books."

"Please," he said gently. "The Syllabus doesn't need anything: I've already proofread the text that WESCAC read out and corrected the mistaken passages. It's you that needs the Syllabus."

"You're from Business Administration," I ventured next, but I was too much upset still to relish the sarcasm. "All this rigmarole is somebody's notion of a way to sell textbooks."

Tranquilly he shut his eyes until I was done. Then, his good humor unimpaired, he said, "I enjoy raillery, classmate, but there just isn't time. Here's what you need to know: I'm not from this campus (you've guessed that already). My alma mater is New Tammany College — you couldn't have heard of it, it's in a different university entirely. And my father was George Giles." He paused. "The true GILES; classmate: the Grand Tutor of our Western Campus."

I leaned back in my swivel-chair. The hour was late. Outside, the weather roared. Nothing was getting done. Distraught to my marrow, I acknowledged him — "Was, you say." But I was almost incapable of attending what he said.

For the first and only time his expression turned sorrowful. "He's no longer with us. He has… gone away for a while."

Dreamily I said, "But he'll come back, of course."

He looked at me. "Of course."

"One day — when we need him again." How I should have liked to sleep.

His smile returned, albeit melancholily. "We need him now. Things are worse than they ever were in his day. But he's — on a sort of sabbatical leave, you might say. It's up to us to carry on."

He pressed upon me then his story, which I heard in my torpor and made this sense of only on later recollection: His father was or had been some sort of professor extraordinarius (of what subject I never learned) whose reputation rested on his success in preparing students to pass their final examinations. His pedagogical method had been unorthodox, and so like many radicals he had worked against vehement opposition, even actual persecutions: I gathered his tenure was revoked and he was dismissed from his position on a charge of moral turpitude while still in his early thirties — though it was not clear to me whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he'd left the campus for a short time, returned clandestinely (don't ask me why) to confer with his protégés, and then disappeared for good. The tale was like so many others one has heard, I could almost have predicted certain features — such as that these same protégés had subsequently dedicated their lives to spreading their Mentor's word and institutionalizing his method as they understood it; that they too were roughly used as they transferred from college to college, but won proselytes by their zeal wherever they went. Neither was it surprising to learn that this Professor Giles, this "Grand Tutor" as his son called him, never committed his wisdom to the press: what academic department has not its Grand Old Man who packs the lecture-halls term after term but never publishes a word in his field? In fact, the one unusual particular of the whole story as I heard it this first time was the not-very-creditable one that the man had got a child, by a lady married to someone else; otherwise it was the standard painful history of reformers and innovators.

The problem for my visitor, then — the fruit of this illicit planting — was the common one faced by second-generation followers of any pioneer: to formulate the Master's teaching into some readily disseminable canon, a standard and authority for the fast-swelling ranks of its adherents. By the time Stoker Giles had reached young manhood his father's original pupils were already divided into factions; the son's first thought had been to compile as a source-book their reminiscences of the great man's life and tenure, but so many discrepancies, even contradictions, were made manifest in the collation, he abandoned that project. In its early stages, however, he had gone so far as to read the several texts into an automatic computer, as our fashionable classicists are fond of doing nowadays, to speed the work of comparing them — and here, gentle editors and publishers, your credulity like mine must flex its muscles for a considerable stretch.

This remarkable computer, I was told (a gadget called WESCAC), not only pointed out in accordance with its program the hopeless disagreement of the texts; on its own hook, or by some prior instruction, it volunteered further that there was in its Storage "considerable original matter" read in fragmentarily by George Giles himself in the years of his flourishing: taped lecture-notes, recorded conferences with protégés, and the like. Moreover, the machine declared itself able and ready (with the aid of "analogue facilities" and a sophistication dismaying at least to a poor humanist like myself) to assemble, collate, and edit this material, interpolate all verifiable data from other sources such as the memoirs then in hand, recompose the whole into a coherent narrative from the Grand Tutor's point of view, and "read it out" in an elegant form on its automatic printers! The son, as disinclined to writing as the father but apparently commanding some authority in his college, agreed, and in the face of opposition from certain "Gilesians" as well as "anti-Gilesians," the computer made good its promise. After several false starts and program adjustments it produced a first-person chronicle of the life and teachings of the Grand Tutor, a text so faithful to the best evidence and polished in its execution that young Stoker needed only to "change a date or a place-name here and there," as he vowed, to call it finished.

The great test came, he told me, when he took the manuscript to one Peter Greene, an early student of Giles's, now past sixty and the strongest critic of the "WESCAC Project." A famous teacher in his own right by then, Greene met the youngster with a scowl and only after much persuasion agreed to listen to a dozen pages. Refusing even to sit, he paced the floor of his office with every prejudice in his expression (so Stoker declared) as the reading began. At the end of page one he stood still; halfway through the second he was weeping; by the third he was on his knees at the young man's feet, begging his pardon and declaring it was "the GILES's very voice" that sounded off the pages!

Thus was born The Revised New Syllabus, which like its narrator and its evangels was destined for arduous vicissitudes. Those Gilesians whose teaching it contradicted — some of them chairmen of their own departments by that time — charged that the work was spurious, concocted either by WESCAC or by the upstart Stoker Giles, perhaps both, if not by the "Dean o' Flunks" himself.* The most antipathetic went so far as to deny that my visitor was actually the Grand Tutor's son, calling him an opportunist and antigiles who made the best of an accidental resemblance; while the non-Gilesians, "naturally," maintained as they had from the first that the man called George was never "the true GILES" at all but a dangerous impostor, and that the R.N.S., "authentic" or not, was anti-intellectual, immoral, subversive, and altogether unfit for undergraduate reading-lists.

* Quem vide infra.

My visitor sighed as he concluded this account, and toyed glumly with the shaft of his stick; then with a shrug his animation returned. "But it all worked to our advantage, you understand — all that censorship and prohibition, and beating us up and throwing us in jail. Even the imitations and pirated versions that everybody ran into print with helped us out — you must have wished for that sort of ruckus over your own books! We put up with it, just as Dad used to, and the New Curriculum gets established sooner or later despite all. Because you see, classmate, the one thing we have on our side is the only thing that matters in the long run: we're right. The others are wrong." His face was joyous. "It may take a hundred semesters, but we know the New Curriculum will win. The non-majors will flunk; the impostors and false tutors will be exposed. It's just a matter of time until that book on your desk there will be in every briefcase on every campus in the University. It must be so: there isn't any other hope for studentdom."

He consulted his walking-stick watch again and abruptly rose to leave. It occurred to me that I had lost track of the clock-chimes from Main Tower.

"I can't stay longer; I've got other colleges to visit — even other universities." He winked at me. "There are other universities, you know."

"Look here, now — " I shook my head vigorously to throw off my drowsiness and indicated the box of typescript. "What am I supposed to do with this? I don't have time — "

"Indeed you don't!" He laughed — and what a stance he struck with his mad cane! "It's late, late, late, that's certain! On the other hand, you have all the time there is, exactly." He poked at the manuscript with his stick. "Forget about yourself if you like. Just send this on to your publishers without reading it; they'll be grateful enough, and so will your students. Or throw it out, if you don't care what happens to them on the Finals. I have other copies for other campuses; this one is your affair entirely…"

He spoke without testiness, only a bit teasingly: now, however, it was my shoulder he touched the stick to, and his voice became full of a fiery solicitude. "But classmate, read it! We lecture to studentdom as a whole, and yet there isn't any studentdom, Daddy always said that — only students, that have to be Graduated one at a time. I want you to be Giles's professor to this campus, for their sakes; but more than that I want you to Commence yourself, for your own sake. Do read it!"

A moment longer the stick-tip rested there. Then he tapped me a little smart one with it and left, calling back from the hallway, "I'll keep in touch!"

But he never did. His typescript languished beside mine — the one unread, the other unwritten — even got mixed with it by a careless janitor. I took a breath, and the winter term was over; paused a moment to reflect, and found myself thirty-two. What gets better? Confronting a class I forgot what my opinion was about anything, and had to feign illness. Famous men died; the political situation deteriorated. No longer could I eat at bedtime as a young man does and still sleep soundly. Fewer social invitations; presently none. The polar ice-cap, scientists warned, is going to melt. The population problem admits of no solution. "Today's freshman is more serious about his studies than were his predecessors — but is he also perhaps less inclined to think for himself?" Yesterday one was twenty; tomorrow one dies of old age.

In unnaturally clear March twilight when the air is chill, one reflects upon passionate hearts now in their graves and wishes that the swiftly running hours were more intense. Young men and girls cut off while their blood flamed, sleeping in the fields now; old folks expiring with the curse; the passionately good, the passionately wicked — all in their tombs, soft-lichened, and the little flowers nodding. One yearns to make a voyage. Why is one not a hero?

I read The Revised New Syllabus. Do you likewise, gentlemen and ladies in whose hands this letter is!

A final word. I sought diligently to locate Mr. Stoker Giles, or Giles Stoker (the comma in his name on the title-page, and my imperfect memory of that fateful evening's details, make the order uncertain), with an eagerness you will presently appreciate. In vain: no such name is in our Student Directory, nor is a "New Tammany College" listed in the roll of accredited institutions of higher learning. At the same time I consulted one of our own computer-men on the matter of the R.N.S.'s authorship: his opinion was that no automatic facility he knew of was capable presently of more than rudimentary narrative composition and stylistics — but he added that there was no theoretical barrier even to our own machine's developing such a talent in time. It was simply a matter of more sophisticated circuitry and programming, such as the computer itself could doubtless work out; literature and composition, he observed, like every other subject, were being ably taught by the gadget in pilot projects all over our quarter of the campus, and it was his conviction that anything "computer-teachable" (his term) was "computer-learnable." Moreover, he could not vouch for what his military colleagues might be up to, not to mention their counterparts "on the other side"; the computer-race he counted no less important than the contest in weapons-development, and it had become as shrouded in secrecy. His impression was that our enemies were more concerned with raw calculation-power than with versatility and sophistication — there was no evidence of their using computers as we do to manage sausage-making, recommend marriages, bet on sporting-events, and compose music, for example — but no one could say for sure.

Acknowledge with me, then, the likelihood that The Revised New Syllabus is the work not of "WESCAC" but of an obscure, erratic wizard whose nom de plume, at least, is Stoker, Giles; and, again with me, acknowledge further that this is not the only possibility — for as that splendid odd fellow observed, there are in literal truth "other universities than ours." To the individual student of the book's wisdom the question of its authorship is anyhow irrelevant, and it seems most improbable to me that any prior copyrights, for example, will be infringed by its publication. The text herewith submitted I declare to be identical to the one left in my hands on that momentous night (excepting only certain emendations and rearrangements which the Author's imperfect mastery of our idiom and his avowed respect for my artistic judgment encouraged me to make). My intentions are 1) to put aside any monies paid me as agent, against the Author's reappearance; 2) to resign my professorship forthwith, whatever hardship that may work upon my family, and set about the task of my own re-education, to the point even of "becoming as a kindergartener" if necessary; 3) in pursuance of this objective, to compile a more formal and systematic exposition of the Goat-Boy's teachings, as well as a full commentary on and concordance to The Revised New Syllabus — these latter for classroom use in my own "New Curriculum," still in the planning phase.

Which several projects, I hope and believe, together with the extraordinary Syllabus itself, will more than make good what losses you have sustained on my previous manuscripts and vindicate your unremitting, most touching faith in

This regenerate Seeker after Answers,

J.B.