Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
That night, in his large and comfortable bed, the writing teacher dreams a dream. In the dream, the writing teacher is in a bare room, watching as a strange game unfolds. The game is played using round black and white tokens. These tokens—large cardboard dots—are affixed to the backs of three faceless prisoners. A prison warden (also faceless) has been tasked with freeing a single prisoner and, for reasons not elaborated in the dream, wishes to employ a rational system to make his selection. In the game there are a total of five cardboard dots, two black and three white. The prisoners are aware of the number of dots and their respective colors. Each prisoner is to have a single dot taped to his back. The first prisoner to identify the color of his dot for logical reasons, without recourse to his reflection or direct communication with the other two prisoners, will be freed. And presumably go on to lead a full and liberated life.
In the dream game, the faceless warden decides to affix white dots to all three of the prisoners’ backs. This removes the scenario, the dreaming writing teacher observes, in which one prisoner sees two black dots (he will immediately conclude that his dot is white) and introduces uncertainty. Each of the prisoners sees two white dots. Therefore, they must conclude that the warden has either assigned three white dots—which is the case—or that the warden has assigned two white dots and one black dot. It is, at first glance, equally unclear to each of the prisoners whether they have been assigned a white or a black dot.
This first glance is a moment in which nothing regarding the dream game has so far been resolved, except that the distribution of dots is not immediately knowable.
Each of the prisoners recognizes that the other two prisoners, like him, hesitate to act. They also recognize the meaning of this hesitation. They slowly come to understand that the hesitation means that everyone is seeing the same thing. Each of the three prisoners sees two white dots, and no one sees either: A. two black dots, or B. a white dot and a black dot. The prisoner seeing scenario A would immediately come to a conclusion about the color of his dot (= white) and rush off. Prisoners seeing scenario B would immediately recognize that they are not black dots because the prisoner they see wearing a white dot continues to hesitate, rather than rushing off to share his conclusion, and those seeing scenario B would in turn rush off, having used induction to conclude. Everyone is hesitating. This inertia is meaningful. Since it is a kind of inertia that is recognizable, the writing teacher thinks, it is useful.