For a moment it was so quiet in the room I thought I could hear the worms feasting on the spines of the books that confined us in this noisome cell. My problem was deeper than the passivity Armbruster observed. I was a total washout, once more having blundered, just as I must somehow have gaffed up with my father (why else would he have abandoned me?). Outside and from far away came the sad consolation of bells tolling. Someone, probably one of those music majors, had again gained access to the keyboard hammers of the carillon in Harkness Tower and was banging out a baroque rendition of “Melancholy Baby,” and a sudden wave of peace and contentment washed over me. At last, I thought, an end to abstruse striving, to dogmatic bluster, Talmudic dissection, to the fractured assignment of Meaning and Levels to a phrase, a clause, a guiltless comma which the author, pinned like a butterfly on a board, probably never intended when he wrote it (who can fathom the mind of a writer?). An end to the inkhorn vocabulary of literary scholarship that was like a throat disease. A host of favorite terms bounced around my mind, derived from half a dozen legitimate languages, melded into a kind of lobotomized Esperanto so piss-elegant they self-destructed on the tongue into parody: logaoedic, sestina, litotes, stasimon, meiosis, burletta, diverbium…

Hooray and hallelujah, I told myself, an end to the absolutes of the pundit at the podium, that mild, murderous voice of orthodoxy which brooked no contradiction. An end to puny, pedantic jokes, to jabberwocky that was meant to clarify…

Hermeneutics, pleonasm, vorticism, catecresis, prosopopoeia, peripeteia… I rattled them off with the ease of a combat veteran reciting his rifle number: dibrach, prolegomenon, choriamb, chiasmus…

Was I going mad, or was it the euphoria of reprieve? The gibberish charged around my skull like a squirrel on a treadmill. The seizure continued, I couldn’t stop it. The panic grew, the idiot internal voice persisted anacoluthon tmesis rodomontade virelay…

The spillage was ineradicable, but the mind is a palimpsest, and if its images can’t be painted out they can be painted over. The trick is to concentrate on something else, on… on… A jingle of childhood burst into my head, that holy couplet of release we used to shout on the last day of school when the long unending summer beckoned and flashed like the Grail, all sun and silver:

No more lessons, no more books,

No more teachers’ dirty looks.

School was out for me, forever, and sumer icumen in. The balm of relief spread over me like the cool, sweet sweat that follows a consuming illness. I felt kindly toward Armbruster, amorous toward life, and joyful toward the world erziehungsroman ubi sunt enjambent Freytag’s Pyramid…

“You all right, son?” Armbruster’s concern cut through the bombardment.

“I’m sorry. What were you…?”

“I was saying, well, what are you going to do?”