Giles Goat Boy by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page A

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 a 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 hisavowed respect for my artistic judgment encouraged me to make). My intentions are 1)