Whatsizname didn’t stay with us long. His skills were too fine for our coarse and paltry town, and the Lord called him to a pulpit in Pittsburgh. The little interest my parents took in the church flickered faintly for a few months after that, and then went quietly out. Whether virtues are finally of two kinds, and whether vice is the practice of a passive virtue in a time and situation which calls for action, or v. versa, is really irrelevant. What is important is that Jerry—what was he called?—gave me my first demonstration of the power of the word. Didn’t Emerson develop his sense of things in the same way? So did many politicians, writers, scholars, in the rural South. Adolf Hitler had a similar experience—only it was in that movie about a political agitator he saw in Vienna, the one made from a Kellermann novel. Der Tunnel, it was titled. Yes. At least I’ve got that right. Though K. may be spelled with one n. I’m not sure.

Starlings. Lost utterly to history. Amelita Galli-Curci. Ah, my dear, my dear. You were so thrillhilly, so sweet, so clear. The stars seem to be rubbing their banana-colored beaks against the sheltering branches. And the sparrows, of course, constantly quarrel and complain. The world will be theirs one day, though no one will record it. There’s also the occasional clink of soda bottles shivering in the door of the fridge, a distant shoefall or creak from a stair. I am able to classify the tick of a twig against a window, the pop of a cold wall where it butts the chimney, and that delicate tink which marks the recoil of a lamp chain from its pull. Now I hear a jay cawing like a crow. No Grote. No Macaulay. Macaulay is class-sick, Planmantee shouts, punching Culp on the arm. The angry chitter of the squirrels has altered into something strident and unpleasantly mechanical, while I sit in my own weak Pepys as in my own smear—my wet like one incontinent—and fuss.

My will—it falters—and my pen escapes the track it lays to dildo on the margins. A role, I was about to write . . . Sincerity, I was about to say . . . Yet Hitler—the dissembler, the liar, the hypocrite, the mountebank, the deluder, the con man, the sophist, the manipulator, the dreamer, the stage manager, and the ultimate ham—he was probably history’s single most sincere man.

Even alone, marooned in this room without a sample day of the week—say, a Monday or a Friday—to serve me, the vitam impendere vero is not for me, any more than it really was for Gide, who was perhaps dazzled by the bad example of Rousseau, that professional fess-upper, whom I should less readily believe than Casanova, to whom Truth was the ardent center of a tossed skirt.

A role, I was about to write . . . Lousy morning, lamentable afternoon, and now a demeaning evening, a humiliating play. Of words. So rig a role, hey . . . gimme, gimme . . . rigamarole, say . . . a part . . . oh yes, a rite, a ritual . . . gimme mine . . . I hear the leerer’s jeer at the sight of my fallen pants. O I hear History—Yours and Mine. I hear the universal razzmatazz. It is a singalong led by Endless Night & the Eternal Spheres.