A Man's Life

The man in the bed found himself again. He was a boy at home, condemned
to toil in his father's garden without respite. It was a hostile garden,
horribly rectangular. It was laid out in squares and rows, and no weed
was allowed to enter. It was his job to see to that. He hated the sight
of the severely pruned plants condemned to their yearly toil. There were
no untidy plots, no unevenness; the raspberry canes stood as stiffly as
soldiers on parade, without an unlawful bud spoiling their terrible and
tortured symmetry. The bushes were all in a formal pattern, just as his
life was. Regularly the garden was manured; and how he loathed the smell
of manure! Yet from it Life sprang with a terrifying zest. And the boy
felt that Life had cut and pruned him, too. He could not look ahead: it
seemed to him that he would always be a prisoner in that terrible garden.

His mother was kinder. She, by some strange dispensation, was allowed to
scatter seeds anywhere, never quite sure what she was scattering, and
allowing the plants--useless flowers, not ungainly vegetables--to follow
their vagrant dispositions. That was what the world should be, a tangle
of arrogant plants, springing even from the rectangular paths. And he
felt the inhibitions of his personality so keenly that he looked forward
to his future with a silent terror. He could not see over the trimmed
hedges to the world without.

There was one escape--books. He read everything he could find. Night
after night he would slip down to a library, bathing himself in wonderful
beauty, only half understood, but letting strange and exciting worlds
invade his soul. He read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Shakespeare;
scientific books, adventures, poetry--anything that promised him
knowledge. For he felt within him a strange and eager desire to
understand everything. But the more he read the more he faltered. He used
to look up at the backs of the volumes on the shelves. Some day he would
know them all, every page in every book! He was not going to let Life
beat him in his tremendous quest.

So night after night, having done his lessons--of what use were
lessons?--he would look up with a sigh of discontent. He would never know
all--everything! Life was too short for that. Of course, he told himself
in self-pity that he would die young. Poets, he had read, oft-times died
young: that was their luck; they did not have to face a grown-up world.
But he felt within him so much that he could not express. How terrible
for him--and for the world--if he died that night! Humanity would never
know what it had lost. Other poets were growing all around him,
threatening his supremacy, getting a start in the quest of Fame. If only
he knew how to express himself, but his mind was all fluidity--images
that he could not grasp, eluding, tremendous and staggering wonders. Life
wasn't large enough for him to express all that was in his soul.