The End of the Road by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page A

and the weather, their usual analogy: a day without weather is unthinkable, but for me at least there were frequently days without any mood at all. On these days Jacob Horner, except in a meaningless metabolistic sense, ceased to exist altogether, for I was without a character, without a personality: there was no ego; no I . Like those microscopic specimens that biologists must dye in order to make them visible at all, I had to be colored with some mood or other if there was to be a recognizable self to me. The fact that my successive and discontinuous selves were linked to one another by the two unstable threads of body and memory; the fact that in the nature of Western languages the word change presupposes something upon which the changes operate; the fact that although the specimen is invisible without the dye, the dye is not the specimen—these are considerations of which I was aware, but in which I had no interest.
    On my weatherless days I merely existed. My body sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked and rocked, and my mind was as nearly empty as interstellar space. Such was the day after the Morgans’ visit: I sat and rocked from eight-thirty in the morning until perhaps two in the afternoon. If I looked at Laocoön at all, it was without recognition. But at two o’clock the telephone rang and startled into being a Jacob Horner, who jumped from the chair and answered it.
    “Hello?”
    “Jacob? This is Rennie Morgan. Will you have dinner with us tonight?”
    “Why, for God’s sake?” This Jacob Horner was an irritable type.
    “Why?” repeated Rennie uncertainly.
    “Yes. Why the hell are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner?”
    “Are you angry?”
    “No, I’m not angry. I just want to know why you’re all so anxious to feed me a dinner.”
    “Don’t you want to come?”
    “I didn’t say that. Why are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner? That’s all I asked.”
    There was a pause. Rennie was one who took all questions seriously; she would not offer an answer simply to terminate a situation, but must search herself for the truth. This, I take it, was Joe’s doing. Another person would have asked pettishly, “Why does anybody ask anybody for dinner?” and thereby cloaked ignorance in the garb of self-evidence. After a minute she replied in a careful voice, as though examining her answer as she spoke.
    “Well, I think it’s because Joe’s pretty much decided that he wants to get to know you well. He enjoyed the conversation last night.”
    “Didn’t you?” I interrupted out of curiosity. I didn’t really see how she could have, for we had talked of nothing but abstract ideas, and Rennie’s determined but limited participation had been under what struck me as a tacit but very careful scrutiny from her husband. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything ungenuine in Rennie’s interest, though it was awfully deliberate, or anything of the husband embarrassed by his wife’s opinions in Joe’s concern about her statements; his attention was that of a tutor listening to his favorite protégé, and when he questioned her opinions he did so in an entirely impersonal, unarrogant, and unpedantic manner. Joe was not a pedant.
    “Yes, I believe I did. Do you think that there ought to be a kind of waiting period between visits, Jacob?”
    I was amazed. “What do you think?”
    Again a short pause, and then a solemn opinion.
    “It seems to me that there wouldn’t be any reason for it unless one of us just happened to feel like not seeing the other for a while. I think sometimes a person feels that way. Is that how you feel, Jake?”
    “Well, now, let me see,” I said soberly, and paused. “It seems to me that you do right to question the validity of social conventions, like waiting a certain time between visits, but you have to keep in mind that they’re all ultimately unjustifiable. But it doesn’t follow that because a thing is unjustifiable it’s without value. And you have