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CRUEL IMMORTALITYI
Edmund
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
It is two months now since the incredible happened. If it has indeed happened. It willtake longer for me to be sure of that; five years perhaps. But I have decided to believe it.Indeed I do believe it. But I know there will be doubts, know therefore that I must placeno great hopes or fears in this thing, if only that is possible. It won't be, of course.I feel urged, compelled to place it all on record. I have told two people, one of whomthinks, fears, that it might be true. If it is, then an impossible future stretches ahead of me,a future of fifty-five years, barring accidents. If it is not going to turn out true then I mighthave thought it is logically impossible. But after long consideration I am fairly convincedthat it is only physically impossible, and what begins as physically impossible can later,or in extraordinary circumstances, become possible. I almost relish seeing how reality isgoing to refute one fancied logical impossibility after another. Can a man go back into hismother's womb when he is old, I seem to remember as a rhetorical question from thegospel. I believe that, for better or worse, I am all set for something pretty close to that.All set indeed, because it
can't be changed
, even if I'm sorry or ought to be sorry for lettingmyself into it, like a woman who gets herself sterilized and then enjoys responsibility-freesex with her uxorious husband for the rest of her life, even though she has piouslyrepented.How on earth shall I tell this story? Because I want to tell everything, everything relevantand of personal interest. This, in fact, will be only the beginning. Afterwards I intend torecord, perhaps in diary form or at least occasional entries, how the future develops, thatfuture which will be like the past, as we used to read of Hume denying or doubting; yes,like the past, but so terribly, oh let it not be nightmarishly, unlike it.
 
I will introduce myself. My name is Edmund Joubert. Well, you can be sure it isn't; it's adifferent name. I was born in England in 1924. Both my parents are dead and I live withmy wife Leticia in another country, which I will probably name in due course. She is thesame age as I am, fifty-five, and the importance of this fact will soon become clear. Shedoesn't look it, of course, and of how old I look I have and will probably continue to haveonly the vaguest idea. That indeed will constitute the enormous uncertainty of myimmediate future. How strange, that I could die tomorrow, while what has happened tome would remain true while entirely without its effect.In fact I am a writer by profession, so I have a chance of capitalizing on this monstrosity.However it is new for me to be writing for the general public, if that is what I am doing.Is there a general public really? No I normally write philosophical texts, having taught invarious universities. My present position is due to end quite soon, and I hardly expect toget another. But I cannot pretend that I might not have done what I have done whateverthe situation had been.I am employed at a university, the sole university, a Catholic one, in a small Africancountry. If I were, or later become, involved in the novel-writing business I could reallysend that place up, in a satire which might fittingly be called
Black Mischief II 
. But beforeanyone accuses me of racism or whatever let me add that I really am a victim, or abeneficiary, of black mischief, though I mean more the cultural complex than the colour.Anyhow it's more Lucas Linton's fault than anyone else's, apart from my own, and he'sEnglish.Lucas lives permanently on campus with his Polish wife, a weird creature if ever therewas one. Many years in Nigeria alone before the marriage, teaching some form ofchemistry (alchemy more likely) had turned her into a pot-bellied, untidy female, neverwithout a cigarette. There were no longer children in the house. Amusement, andamusing experiments, were all she had to live for, I wouldn't mind betting.Lucas himself had come to the place as a physics lecturer. After a tiff with his department(he knew too much physics) he had somehow managed to turn himself into the country'sofficial historian, settling down in their comfortable stone house to write book after bookon such matters as the history of the capital city, of the colonial wars or of odd particularincidents such as the scandalous murder of a local woman by a missionary in the lastcentury or the resurgence of systematic cannibalism up among the mountain people. Thatmanuscript, he told me, he was keeping until he finally felt it was time to leave the place.Yes, Lucas had a librarian's mind, his house so full of books, papers, old colonial recordsand so on that the book-dust was slowly killing him, whatever it was doing to Agnieszka.He had a fund of stories, information rather, about the locals and their ways. In fact hecombined a kind of liberal leftish pretence of according equal weight to African ways ofseeing things with what was in reality a total scepticism or scientific contempt, as one
 
might call it, for these ways. No doubt if one had pointed out that pretence was involvedhe would have been offended. So I didn't. One could after all talk about anything elsewith the man, provided, that is, that one didn't mind the fact that he never listened to one.Anything one mentioned would equally set him off upon some long monologue which,as amounting always to a giving of information, could in general be acceptable. I hadafter all no wish or need to impress him. If it happenedthat he had no information to give then one's conversational gambit would be met with atotal blankness, prefaced perhaps with a "What?" and immediately concluded, uponrepetition, with a dismissive "Oh I see". A silence would then follow, I myself beingunfailingly nonplussed, which would be broken either by his saying "Would you like adrink?" or by my getting up to go. At these moments Agnieszka would sometimes winkat me in her mannish way, though we never got round to discussing her husband'speculiarities, her own being far too pronounced for that. My own wife, on the other hand,tended to be rather depressed by this lack of social grace on the part of just about the onlycultured Westerner on campus and accompanied me less and less often to the house.On the evening in question, in any case, and there was indeed such an evening, she wasaway on her annual trip to Europe. She went away each winter; otherwise it would havebeen too much for her to live with me there at all, the environment being hostile andbarbarous in the main, besides which it became extremely cold in winter at the highaltitude, the houses having been designed by a European architect for a more tropicalclimate. So I went over to the Lintons as much for human comfort as anything else.After the meal, a heavy Polish affair guaranteed to keep one awake all night, we settleddown to talk and I happened to refer to my experiences trying to teach the local studentsthe significance of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy, a title I was inclined todeny him in view of my Aristotelian bias. I tended to see the Enlightenment period as anextension of Scholastic decadence rather than as the dawn of a new epoch."Oh well, I don't know about that," said Lucas. He never did. "But wasn't Descartes theone who brought up that business about the pineal gland?"This unwonted request for information amazed me. "He was," I replied, "but why do youask?""I'll tell you later. You just tell me more about the gland." He stared at me intently."Well, there's not much to tell, or not much that I know. What was it now? Oh yes,Descartes proposed the pineal gland as the place where the soul interacts with the body.I'm sure you know he defended an extreme dualism, soul as mind, body as machine,quite different from the Aristotelian theory of...""Yes, yes. But why the pineal gland?"
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