Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.
It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan,
Connecticut, and California.
Then I had entirely recovered.
Trauma excepted.
Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a
cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--that, and several thousand more
items.
That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.
He is always hanging around.
One has only to turn one's head fast enough--and there he is.
Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few
pages back, partition him off.
He is not behind me, they convince themselves.
But he is.
There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round. Billions of people
apply the blindfold technique in another way:
He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.
The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever.
The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp.
The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game
before my arrow in the Happy Hunting.
Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields.
The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour,
and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise.
The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to
my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand.
What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!
My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am
gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one
really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it,
his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his
Hell.
For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?
Even human nature?
I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan,
while I cut my serial.
4
This is the way of it.
You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase
yonder--and so gain a line.
You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks
set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of
twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty
of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed
through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be
tailored to the desired length.
It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot.