Multi-column

Omensetter’s Luck

Summary

summary::

Thoughts

Highlights

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His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green, remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Israbestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. 🔗

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He sent himself on journeys with an effort that brought sweat to his brow and moistened his palms and the back of his ears. He took ship down the faint crack rivers. He cut his way through matted, tortuous jungles designated by the pale leaves. He trudged across vast blanks of desert and drank thirstily at muddy holes. The days that he was in the wall he thought of himself primarily as a sailor. He conjured up bright images of sail, green swells on the reaches of the ocean, the brown slabs of river mouths and the awesome blue chop and the trailing spray of troubled weather. Climbing the shrouds, the springs of the bed squeaking like a rolling deck and hull and like the tackle in the block, he would sight a dark cloud puffing from the horizon. Funneling up, it would run at the ship and Israbestis would hitch himself on his elbow, waving his other arm free of the clothes, and shout, "Look out, she's coming on, look out, look out," for he knew no nautical terms and nothing of seamanly action. Pain would storm at his eyes. Sweat would drip from his nose. "She's a blower, captain, aye, she's a roller, captain," Israbestis would cry. "The worst I've seen in these seas." The hiss of his words was like the spray from the bow. Israbestis screamed in order to be heard above the wind in the rigging that was howling in the shrouds and through the ports of the ship. Then all of a sudden it would be gone. He would watch the paling cloud and the dimpled water disappear before he fell, for a moment, asleep. 🔗

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He saw a blade of dry grass, suddenly, as something strange, not grass at all. It was like looking at a word until it melted. Mabel Fox has ears like a fox. The world seemed to dwindle in his vision of the blade. 🔗

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He knew when trains did anything.
I bet he was fierce as anything, like a turkey.
Turkeys aren't very fierce.
I hate turkeys. They gobble at you.
Well Kick's cat was fiercer than that.
I bet. I bet he could fly.
Of course he couldn't.
He could.
No.
At night. At night he could.
Say, who knows about this cat, boy, you or me?
Tell me how he knew about trains and stations.
You going to listen or talk?
I want it to be a long story.
It is a long story.
Put everything in it.
I always put everything in it.
Is it good and long? Good stories are long. 🔗

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My cat hates milk.
You don't have a cat and if you did he wouldn't hate milk, but if he hated milk he'd be a beaver and bite you in half like a log. 🔗

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Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha—none of the things you'd loved. 🔗

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The Love and Sorrow of Henry Pimber 🔗

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Everything that didn't matter and made them feel good, they did. 🔗

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Henry loved to tell of everything he saw when he passed Omensetter's house, though he was cowardly and quiet about the fox, and neither he nor his listeners ever thought how strange it was they took such interest in the smallest things their newest neighbor did, for Omensetter cast an interest like a shade. It was as though one could, by knowing when his beans went in or when he cut his firewood for washing, hoed, or simply walked a morning in the oak and maple woods like a tree among the trees himself, learn his secret, whatever his secret was, since it must somehow be the sum of these small things all grown together, for as Doctor Orcutt was so fond of pointing out, every measle was a sign of the disease, or as Mat Watson said, every turn of wind or rift of cloud was a parcel of the acreage of weather. 🔗

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The Triumph of Israbestis Tott 🔗

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That Omensetter had a secret no one doubted now. Gossip was continuous, opinion split, the atmosphere political. One would have thought it France. Henry's own salvation was the central thing, and Henry was frequently vexed to the point of tears, weak as he still was, by the constant queries, the noisy quarrels, the wild conjectures of his friends. Nothing escaped them: chance was reperceived as calculation, distant possibilities were carried briskly into likelihood, the flimsiest hypotheses spun into woolens for a tapestry, and each conclusion was communicated to the town like a disease. At first consigned by nearly everyone to God and so to the faith of Reverend Furber, though always by a smaller group to Science and hence to the skill of Doctor Orcutt, the cur—except for a scattered few who insisted upon the will and constitution of Henry himself—was now almost universally awarded to the beet root poultice and the luck of Brackett Omensetter. But what did this amount to? This credited the cure to ... what? Edna Hoxie had an increase of trade, though Maggie Scanlon—unwedded, large—scoffed at the question. Don't he always get what he wants, she said. He's happy, ain't he, the sonofabitch. I wish to god I was. 🔗

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Henry hadn't been prepared for anyone like Omensetter. He'd been content to believe that he would always live with usual men in a usual world; but he'd lived with himself all these years like a stranger—and with everybody else. 🔗

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He would sit so quietly within the shadows behind the forge that visitors scarcely noticed he was there. It was like the effect of his illness, for after a period of pain and confusion he thought his eyes had cleared and he had watched from his bed as if from out of the world. It had been as he imagined it was like to be invisible. Your eyes were open. People looked into them but they didn't think you saw. They were less than a mirror, no more than a painting of eyes. The sickness was nothing. Many times he had struggled to say that he could hear. Being stretched to pieces was nothing. Many times he'd tried to shout I can see, I can see you—hissing instead. Fighting for breath was nothing. Burning was nothing. Locked in a shrinking boot of flesh, hour after hour he remembered Jethro Furber's prayers. 🔗

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Wars, Watson said.
He began hammering.
Wars, he shouted, more boys ... replace dead ones.
Sparks flew in arcs and showers to the floor.
Doctor Orcutt wiped his mouth and stared at Henry through the rain of sparks.
The bar—reluctant—bent.
The doctor leaned back, tilting his chair. He gazed solemnly at the ceiling where a spider dropped itself by jerks from a beam.
Omensetter threaded a needle.
There was a lull in the hammering through which Henry's ears sang.
In passing, Lloyd Cate waved.
Each man looked morose and thoughtful.
Tott patted his pockets, hunting his harmonica.
Finally Orcutt said: lucky to be alive by god—in a low but outraged voice.
The hammering began again. The cool iron jumped. 🔗

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Henry ignored his wife's voice; dipped his hand in the wind. The leaves were learning of the cold. He turned his palm, allowing the wind to pass between his fingers. Cool as hill water it seemed to flow from the pale clouds. This is how it feels, he thought, to run through the cup of Omensetter's hands. Time goes coolly through the funnel of his fingers -click, click, click—like water over stones. When he had lately felt the wind he seldom had another feeling; yet there were moments, as if in dream, when he could plunge his hand into the air and feel the stream at the lip of Being, and the hesitating water. There was a bather at the precipice with breasts as great as God's, nippled as the berry bush, bright as frost. Corn golden hair was gathered to His thighs. Not in my image. Nothing like me. But in the dream that disabled him, he was afloat on the brink, poised above the incredible gulf like a bird, while each minute frightened him by passing over. With his hands on his ears he could feel them falling. Below lay an empty plain where the bright stream dried. It then became a road that thinned to a rail in the cold horizon. He heard the roar of a miracle coming, a long beak looking for snakes. 🔗

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Time? Oh dear. Time. The animal. Smell him. There's no time to him. There's only himself. Like a cow whose bowels are moving. Heavens—time. What do you want from him? You'll never get it, whatever it is. He cares for no one, don't you know that? Not even you, Henry. Oh look what you're doing—letting the wind in. Shut the door. 🔗

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The path took Henry Pimber past the slag across the meadow creek where his only hornbeam hardened slowly in the southern shadow of the ridge and the trees of the separating wood began in rows as the lean road in his dream began, narrowing to nothing in the blank horizon, for train rails narrow behind anybody's journey; and he named them as he passed them: elm, oak, hazel, larch and chestnut tree, as though he might have been the fallen Adam passing them and calling out their soft familiar names, as though familiar names might make some friends for him by being spoken to the unfamiliar and unfriendly world which he was told had been his paradise. In God's name, when was that? When had that been? For he had hated every day he'd lived. Ash, birch, maple. Every day he thought would last forever, and the night forever, and the dawn drag eternally another long and empty day to light forever; yet they sped away, the day, the night clicked past as he walked by the creek by the hornbeam tree, the elders, sorrels, cedars and the fir; for as he named them, sounding their soft names in his lonely skull, the fire of fall was on them, and he named the days he'd lost. It was still sorrowful to die. Eternity, for them, had ended. And he would fall, when it came his time, like an unseen leaf, the bud that was the glory of his birth forgot before remembered. He named the aspen, beech, and willow, and he said aloud the locust when he saw it leafless like a battlefield. In God's name, when was that? When had that been? 🔗

Gemini Summary: This passage plunges deeper into Henry Pimber's psyche, revealing his profound alienation, despair, and obsession with time and mortality. The act of naming trees is a fragile ritual, an attempt to find order and connection in a world he perceives as hostile and fallen. It contrasts sharply with his internal reality: a life where every day is hated, time is both agonizingly slow and terrifyingly fast, and death promises only insignificance. The landscape mirrors his desolation, and the comparison to a fallen Adam underscores his sense of loss and separation from any form of grace or paradise. He is trapped in a cycle of naming external objects while simultaneously cataloging his own internal losses.

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It was since his sickness ... Everything began with—since his sickness. Once to petrify and die had been his wish; simply to petrify had been his fear; but he had been a stone with eyes and seen as a stone sees: the world as the world is really, without the least prejudice of heart or artifice of mind, and he had come into such truth as only a stone can stand. He yearned to be hard and cold again and have no feeling, for since his sickness he'd been preyed upon by dreams, sleeping and waking, and by sudden rushes of unnaturally sharp, inhuman vision in which all things were dazzling, glorious, and terrifying. He saw then, he thought, as Omensetter saw, except for painful beauty. If there were just a way to frighten off the pain. 🔗

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Not Adam but inhuman. Was that why he loved him, Henry wondered. It wasn't for his life—a curse, god knew; it wasn't for the beet-root poultice. It lay somewhere in the chance of being new ... of living lucky, and of losing Henry Pimber. He had always crammed humanity in everything. Even the air felt guilty. Once he would have seen each tree along this slope boned humanly and branched with feeling like the black bile tree, the locust, despondent even at the summit of the highest summer. How convenient it had been to find his friends and enemies embarked in tame slow trunks, in this or that bent tree, their aspirations safely in high branches and their fires podded into quiet seed. He could pat their bodies with his hands and carve his name and make up animal emotions for them no fruit could contradict. It was always easier to love great trees than people. Such trees were honest. Their deaths showed. 🔗

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The wind might blow here constantly, it would alter nothing; but this was the season of change, Henry's coat billowed out from him, and Omensetter's countenance escaped into the valley. An immense weariness took hold of Henry now, though the sun in the notch was warming. Of course—he'd been a fool—Omensetter lived by not observing—by joining himself to what he knew. Necessity flew birds as easily as the wind drove these leaves, and they never felt the curvature which drew the arc of their pursuit Nor would a fox cry beauty before he chewed. 🔗

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Omensetter left the notch abruptly, and started down. Obedient, Henry followed, and saw between them and the sun a broad-winged hawk like a leaf on the flooding air. The sailor of the wind is loose, he thought; my life is lost down this dead hill. He had raised his arms and now he let them fall. I'm dreadfully sick ... stupidly sick. A scientific fact. Quiet giggles shook him. And I've scarcely been alive. Henry Winslow Pimber. Now dead of weak will and dishonest weather. Some such disease. How would that look carved on my stone? He stumbled. ". . for sweet sakes, Hennie, you'll never have a stone..." I shall be my own stone, then, my dear, my own dumb memorial, just as all along I've been my death and burial, my own dry well—hole, wall, and darkness. I ought to be exposed upon a mountain where the birds can pick my body, for no one could put himself on purpose in this clay. Besides, anyone who's lived so slow and stupidly as I have ought to spend his death up high. His mouth filled. Poor, foolish, stupid bastard, foolish fellow ... foolish wards ...But I'd have made a worthier Omensetter—all new fat, wild hair, and furry testicles like a tiger's. Henry spat. A scientific fact. The saliva drifted against his coat. And when I arrived in my wagon like a careless western hero, clouds would be swimming in the river. Rain would fall beyond us in the forest, the Ohio like a bright hair ribbon ... Gilean—a dream. Lalee. Naa-thing. Lalee. 🔗

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So, Henry thought, well . . . he's going to leave the fox where he has fallen. Anyway, that's that. Yes. That. Because it was impossible to speak in a wind. And there was only weather in it, after all. Weather. Leaves. Pollen, he'd been told, from infinite plants. Dust, too, of course. And the grains that carry cooking, bloom, and pine tree to the nose. Seeds naturally. Flies. Birdie song and the growl of bees. Himself—Pimber—rushing along. Yesterday it was the long night rain that fell, misplaced, through morning. Tomorrow? Tomorrow might be calm. 🔗

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Remember that first evening when you came? You were a stranger, bare to heaven really, and your soul dwelled in your tongue when you spoke to me, as if I were a friend and not a stranger, as if I were an ear of your own. You had mud beneath your arms, mud sliding down the sides of your boots, thick stormy hair, dirty nails, a button missing. The clouds were glowing, a rich warm rose, and I watched them sail till dark when I came home. It seemed to me that you were like those clouds, as natural and beautiful. You knew the secret—how to be. 🔗

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Just the same, Henry said, I thought you measured us by your inhuman measure like the trees, and we were busy ants in hills or well-hived bees whose love was to pursue the queen and bring on death. When you put my hands in bandages and beets I thought I understood. There was no shade between us ever but the shade I'd drawn. You were the same to human or inhuman eye. 🔗

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Henry wiped his eyes. Don't look for Henry here, my dear, he's gone. He's full of foolishness, and off to kill a fox. But I'll not die as low as he did, for I could ornament a tree like the leaves of a maple. No. It should be tall. A white oak maybe, with its wide lobes. There was beauty in the pun: leave-taking. Though it wouldn't be an easy climb for a man who'd been so sick so recently. Still the sun would reach him early there and stay the day, the win blow pleasantly. It ought to seem like leaping to the sea. He went by cherry and by black gum trees calling their names aloud. He was the Adam who remembered them. Tears nevertheless began again. How sorry for it all he felt. How sorry for Omensetter. How sorry for Henry. 🔗

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The Reverend, Jethro Furber's Change of Heart 🔗

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How far was he from what he meant? 🔗

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With the women, look you, observe the ear. The parts appear and come together. So obesity and malice. So grumbling and nagging. So gossip, envy, spite, and avarice. Slowly settling into. So feminine weakness. Heartless piety. Savage morals. They come together. No more goody geedge. Ruthless, lifelong revenge. Zrr. Grease in a cold pan. Stay off from gingerly lobed and delicately whorled ones. Thus appear the parts. Mind your uncle, boy, who knows. And the men then. Lewd speech and slovenly habits. And the peasant's suspicion, his cruelty and rancor, his anger, drunkenness, pig-headed ignorance and bestiality. Inevitable they should be parts. Hoolyhoohoo. All in the normal course of nature. And they were saying we had evolved. What did it mean? But, he said in a voice that was clearly audible, I protest this world of unilluminated cocks. He caught the sense of his own words—so absurd—and his body began to shake—half in laughter, half in despair. 🔗

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The Reverend Andrew Pike, when this church was a cabin, died of his love, eighteen nine. 🔗

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Once before, but in an entirely different manner, he had received a revelation. He was eleven, still a sexless child, weak even then, with signs of palsy and an affinity for fear so pronounced that he had driven his parents nearly out of their wits with it. At that time he sought out terror as though it were a sweetly scented flower. Black and white, bowlegged with a blind eye, Mrs. Kermit Hazen's bulldog would rush across the lawn from his customary place beneath a bush to snap at Furber's shadow where it fell between the picket. All too often they found Jethro lying unconscious there, and then his mother and father would embrace one another, weeping, wondering what in the world they were going to do with their child and why he had been taken with these strange demented ways, so cruel and unnatural. They denied him every book they had not carefully examined themselves, just as they forbade him the Hazen's fence and later the stone quarry and the bluffs beyond town, and finally all farmyards because of the geese and railroad stations because of the engines, then funerals, cemeteries, zoos, and circuses, cellars, closets, attics, deep woods and vacant houses, athletic contests, fires, rallies and revival meetings—indeed any form of public excitement—and they tried to shelter him from the noise and violence of storms too, as well as from every other remarkable exertion of nature; but none of these prohibitions proved of any use for he wantonly disobeyed them, and his father's threats, his mother's hysterical seizures, their hours of mourning and commiseration, since they were things he greatly feared, he sought as eagerly as he sought the bulldog, or accounts of cannibals in books, or the dizziness which always overcame him in high places.
To forbid him the Bible was unthinkable, and since it was a book he might be safely seen with, Jethro Furber's knowledge of it was complete at an early age. He read how they stoned a man for gathering sticks on the sabbath. It was easy to imagine himself in a circle of stones and implacable faces—the faces the worst—for had he not been stung by pebbles and knocked down by a clod of dirt and beaten, too, by his companions? 🔗

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so Furber felt, even as a boy, that if the Lord really wished to bring the world to a terrible end, He would not toss earth and heaven together or bring forth fire from the ground or roll up the sea like a scroll, but simply withdraw Himself so that the whole earth and the heavens beyond the earth would settle quietly into the hands of man. 🔗

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I realized my grief had no connection with my tears. Anyone might see how they streamed, but no one could know how they burned. 🔗

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Arsenius 🔗

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I no longer feel, I only remember. 🔗

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Pike speaks: the way the world is, you have to look down to see up.
You do by god. The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world—if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music—lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum—like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. 🔗

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Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, the war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So—to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method—ancient —of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah ... from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgment and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe—that was an old one—for thus the square is in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all—at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. 🔗

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Hell's the tip of an inverted steeple. The lift's descending. Call it Furber's Fiddling Finger. Call it The Gilean Bum Hoist. 🔗

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How he hated sleep. The world—how did it dare—went on without him while he slept, went on happily—this was proof—for everything he wanted and missed and felt should exist existed just beneath him, as close at hand while out of reach as his own insides, yet tomorrow when he was released and woke and went downstairs the rooms would be stale and unfriendly, a forgotten saucer, maybe, would disgust him, and his parents would be lethargic, cross, and awkward with objects. It had finally occurred to him that he was the figure that altered the sum, just as his presence on the beach so much later had subtracted from everyone's pleasure. So his family and his family's friends were happy because he slept. If he died in the night as he sometimes hoped, thinking to punish them, they would not weep but would pass the hours of his death dipping cookies in their coffee, chuckling, and swirling cream in their frail scalloped cups. Tree, ball, wagon: they were greener, firmer, smoother without him. Hoops, the street: it was intolerable they did not need him, but when he lay in his bed they were more completely. Sleep was bearable only if the whole world slept, he'd decided; yes, we must all sleep together, that was just; and these thoughts, the words "sleep together," without his in the least understanding why at the time, had suddenly awakened the monster in him. Then he'd cruelly scraped his ears and listened at the stairhead like a deer. He thought he heard their clothing parting. Certainly they giggled at the flesh they showed. He saw through the barriers of wall and floor the pale tangle of their limbs. Later he understood what people feared in fearing ghosts. Strange forms smoked along the stairs. Shapes moved vaguely in sheets. Holding his throat he'd risen and wobbled to his bed and sought sleep as he'd sought it ever since: as a friend and lover—further: as a medicine and god. 🔗

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yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between. 🔗

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I am inhabited, Furber said. Ah god, I am possessed. He would sit in his study for hours, searching his mind for some clue to the nature of the creature, the source of what he grimly called "Omensetter's magic," while from his window he would watch the pigeons wheeling to occupy his eyes. Finally he sought out Omensetter himself when Omensetter was strolling in the fields. Why do you inhabit me, he cried, why do you possess my tongue and turn it from the way it wants to go? Leave me, Omensetter, leave us all. He came abruptly on the man, blurting out his speech before his resolution left him and shouting in his excitement, though the words came just as he'd prepared and frequently rehearsed them. Omensetter halted and turned slowly to face Furber, who must have seemed to have lit like a crow behind him. The fellow's eyes were huge, their gaze steady; his whole body was listening, pointing toward Furber like a beast; yes, like a beast, a cow, exactly: wary, stupid, dumb; yes, as he thought back there was nothing in his manner that could be ascribed to an animal higher, and he had never replied; yet Omensetter had not come to church again, he had returned to skipping stones on the river where the people saw his example and said he was a godless man, while Furber preached against frivolity with heat. 🔗

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How differently we give the semblance of life to the stone, he thought. And it did seem a stone until it skipped from the water ... effortlessly lifting... then skipped again, and skipped, and skipped . . . a marvel of transcending ... disappearing like the brief rise of the fish, a spirit even, bent on escape, lifting and lifting, then almost out of sight going under, or rather never lifting from that side of things again but embraced by the watery element skipping there, skipping and skipping until it accomplished the bottom. 🔗

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Pike died of his love, his stone said. Omensetter's stones did not skip on forever either, though they seemed to take heart, or did they renew their fear? from their encounter with the water; but despite this urging each span was less, like that shortness of breath which grows the greater, the greater effort is required—and plip ........ plip ... plipplippliplish was their hearts' register and all they were. 🔗

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But I wonder—you might know now—is it a lie? What ease instead to melt into the body's arms and be one's own sweet concubine. And Omensetter? Is he, in his fashion, like us? Is it cruel to tease stones so? What's your view now you've splashed under? Whatever he gives them, it lasts only a moment. There's no help for it, they have to come down to a stone's end. 🔗

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Ah, Mrs. Pimber. Greetings. I've boiled up six buckets of spying in windows with six cups of sugar and canned three quarts of bachelor love to warm me this winter. That should last nicely if I don't serve it to company, it's calorific. 🔗

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early in their paradisal life the Lord God blessed His man and womankind and said be fruitful, multiply. But how could man beget unless his flesh could rise and what was there in innocence to move the simplest muscle in a gesture of desire? Were men to love unmindful, below the beasts, like flowers? It is impossible to know, of course. That moment has passed for all time. Yet watching Omensetter I sometimes think I’m trembling on the lip of understanding it. It's then I think I recognize the nature of his magic. For whatever Omensetter does he does without desire in the ordinary sense, with a kind of abandon, a stony mindlessness that makes me always think of Eden. The thought is blasphemous, I realize. And this of course is the clue, for more than any man I've ever known, Omensetter seems beyond the reach of God. He's truly out of touch. 🔗

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we know that men are evil, don't we? Don't we? Oh god haven't we observed it often? haven't we bruised our eyes and stunned our hearts to discover the hardness of that truth? Yet Omensetter doesn't seem to be. He does not seem. Seem. Is this correct, this—-seem? Oh you're cows! Is this the feeling? I require an answer not a hiccough. Nannerbantan? TuK? Well he does. He does, doesn't he? Well? Well? And what? And what shall we conclude from all of this then?
We must conclude he is the worst.
He is the worst.
Therefore. 🔗

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cingulum 🔗

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panjandrum 🔗

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jocose 🔗

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him on; in Eve's name 🔗

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Yet he was like them, the rich ones not the real ones, he, the Reverend—with darkness for his dress. In the theater of his head, in the privacy of Philly Furber's Fancy FotoCabinet—what thrilling horrors were enacted, what lascivious scenes encranked. Come to the skull show, honey. Gets no babies out of it, just fun ... fun thin as tish-ee paper, and all rumply crumply. 🔗

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Now he examined the space he intended to preach to. It lay just above an irregular terrain of heads and extended to the gray crossbeams of the nave with their pale dark ax marks and black spots of iron. Beginning at a point in front of him as far as he could leap, it reached through crisscrossing blades of light to the opposite wall where his melting sight composed the space's outer edge. He could imagine, looking at it, how chaos was before the first word. It was a striped waste, a visibly starless night. Dust, chambered in rods, lazily settled in no direction. Indistinctly he could see the tops of those fleshy cabinets which would compartment hell, while above, spanning the peak, were the long bars of heaven and the perching choirs of love. He thought of his voice passing into it, dust dancing to its tune. There'd be land in the shape of his syllables, a sea singing, sky like an echo, plants in bloom burning with speech, animals with yellow answering eyes, and finally men taking form from the chant of their names and gathering in crowds to enlarge their reply to the laments which had created them. 🔗

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We are here—yes—yet we do not belong. This, my friends, is the source of all religious feeling. On this truth everything depends. We are here, yet we do not belong; and though we need comfort and hope and strength to sustain us, anything that draws us nearer to this life and puts us in desire of it is deeply wrong and greatly deceives us. 🔗

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Spink'll soon tinkle her tune to a stop
end in a jiffy her jiggery hop
Here—here—look—in this trouser pocket I've greed like a tree toad. But he really wasn't mean or greedy. He wasn't lazy or lustful, ambitious or lordly. He wasn't gluttonous or covetous or swollen with vanity. And where were envy and anger and cruelty in the manner of his life? Wasn't it wonderful how easily the words came. Just lies upon lies on the cooling paper, the faint, faint odor of leather, the darkened heart behind his eyes... envy and envy and envy and anger ... envy and anger and aching desire ... here—here—I shall raffle off my penis as a prize ... no, let me tell you what I've heard: tree roots have been known to vessel the grimmest granite—that's virtue versus vice in one brief homily ... oh go home, go home and strike at one another—each so well deserving ... I don't know, myself, what to do, where to go ... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort . . . it's what the world offers ... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy. Then bend to your homes. To dream as I fancy: a lady plump and charming, light through lemon leaves, honorable and distinguished wounds. Ah well now, Mrs. Spink, so you've chewed up your sour little hymn. Furber tugged at his shirt sleeves and pressed his coat smooth. 🔗

id886670262

Is he worth all this fuss and march about?
For heaven's sake, he's a human being. He's got more feeling than a fox. You ought to be able to see that.
How hard did you hunt for him when he was still alive? 🔗

id886670543

Though mankind was his hobby—so he'd often said—he knew nothing of men. 🔗

id886670993

Omensetter rattled the knob.
All his speeches ... his beautiful barriers of words ... He thrust a paper spill through the ashes and the room rolled in its flare. After these sounds, would the door come down? The bolt rattled at Omensetter's urging and Furber's hand shook. Wrinkles appeared in the wallpaper; the walls themselves seemed to waver; corners of the room crumpled; the ceiling swooped; there were bats on his pillow. It took a certain sort to undertake such banging—just the sort of loud muscling oaf he was. If he let him in ... then there he'd be, filling the door, huge, breathing heavily, the edges of his fists red, lips wet, body rocking, every bit as real as—as what? the bats on his pillow? the chasm yawning by his bed? the hungry holes in the wall? As the lamp lit, the room grew; its objects steadied. Furber dropped a smoking fragment of paper. He gently mooed and blew upon his fingers. The comedy is finished. The floor was icy. 🔗

id887010496

I can still remember coming, Curtis, Omensetter said quietly at last. Clouds—the river—Gilean by it—the air so clear ... There was every house out honest and every barn banked proper to the weather. .. The trees were bare, I remember, and as we came down the hill we could see the tracks of the wagons glistening. You could see what your life would be. You know—like the gypsy woman who can take your fortune from your hand. Well I took those tracks to be a promise to me... And on the way we'd all been singing. Rose Alymer. I heard it sung so strangely once I never forgot it. The words are high and fine beyond my understanding but I like their sound. And we counted kinds of birds... I guess you think—well, what does it matter? I don't know ... I remember there were rings in the pools of water by the road, and I thought how exciting for the boy to live by the river, to catch fish and keep frogs, you know; grow up with good excitement. Now he's gone sick, Curtis, in this low place, and there's no honest snow to cover it or cold to hold it firmly even, and the hill we came by is still a slippery yellow. The boy is going to die, Curtis. I just feel—I'm scared he's going to die. He's dreadful sick, I know. You've seen him, you and Olus know he's going to die. Why—he's barely been alive ... The boy—the boy, too—he was a promise to me. I hold he was a promise to me. If he dies—well you were all—too—promises. Curtis? Olus? George? Remember? Wasn't there a promise to me? He'll die soon, my son will—soon he'll be dead of this low ground and its dishonest weather. I'll cut that on his stone. If he ever has a stone. I don't think that I can bring myself to put him in this clay. I'll put him on a mountain maybe, where the birds can pick his body. Whoever lives so little and so low as he has should spend his death up high—like Henry's doing. 🔗

id887011134

There were foolish men in the woods, death in the trees. What did a body matter? It was such a damp low place, hardly fit to put a spirit in. What did they think they were rescuing?
In seminary they'd been called The Great Hypotheses. The One and The Other. The Spirit and its Enemy. Yes and No. A and B. Truth against The Adversary, Father of Lies. A always won, while B.... 🔗

id887011375

Death was only another arrangement. For suppose, and mind it narrowly, that life is simply a shadow bodies cast inside themselves when struck by all those queerly various bits and particles, those pieces, streams of—what?—of science. Death in such a case would be only another arrangement. 🔗

id887011435

But no dream could wound as cleverly as the painful edges of perception. 🔗

id887012044

What's the shadow in a swelling corpse? a chorus of shouts? Shut in the earth, it dies each minute, each minute is replaced by the reflection of a new arrangement. So it is with us. So it is with me. So. So. It is so like. Buried in this air, I rot. Moment by moment, I am not the same. And all I desire is to escape—get out. Then notice—look carefully on it—what happens when the body splits. The snow-white wormlings of the flies seethe out. The soul, the immortal principle of life, in its last condition, has come to this—this transmigration. 🔗

id887012967

Heat rises. The soul swells and sails to heaven. Bye baby bunting. No. It is the corpse which obliges. Firm flesh refines itself to fearful fumes by water. 🔗

id887013160

All our life till now is nothing—luck—a raindrop hitting. And our beauty? Brackett, is it a weed, annoying you where it comes up? All our life till now I could live in easy, breathe in easy—swallow easy—loving you. It was as though—as though you'd taken room in me—with that I could be happy. But it was luck, you say, just luck. And when I came to you with my arms before me like a present of flowers? And when I said sweet heart, dear love ... do you remember? Never a foolish name. Dear heart, I said, dear love— 🔗

id887013900

Truth is the father of lies; nothing survives, nothing dies; only the wicked can afford the wise. 🔗

id887016863

Why have You made us the saddest animal? He pushed himself off and felt the jar in his bones. He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can't continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He's a pretty good fellow. 🔗

id887020847

Time ... yeah. We've plenty of time.
Christ, yes, time, we've sure got that. We've got no damn horses but we've got time. 🔗

id887021759

The originality, my churchling smirkers, does not reside in the first line. Pffitt.
There was a young man of De Pauw,
who begot a giraffe with his jaw.
When compelled to admit it,
he said that he did it,
to repeal the Mendelian law.
It don't mean anything to me.
Sit down, Jethro, we've still got business.
But my dears—there's more:
All mankind now started to wonder,
concerning this cosmical blunder.
If giraffes, by this pass, can be got by an ass,
Who's the papa of lightning and thunder? 🔗

id887022391

A muffler from mother. It's like kitten cover. And body is to spirit as—these gloves to a lover. 🔗

id887023397

Listen, Furber said, when I was a little boy and learning letters—A ..., B ..., C ..., love was never taught to me, I couldn't spell it, the O was always missing, or the V, so I wrote love like live, or lure, or late, or law, or liar. 🔗

id887023421

I'll say I lied. I lied and lied. I spread hatred against him—all by lies. I turned myself against him-with my lies. I folded his own heart back against itself, and burned it black with lies. And after my lies, he spelled love: luck. 🔗

id887024064

Doctor Orcutt, who was also treating Brackett Omensetter's frost-eaten feet and fingers, had suggested to Mr. Huffley that he might pay a call of charity upon "that place of desolation," but Mr. Huffley reported that two wild girls had twice flung stones through the woods at him.
Furber chuckled.
Really, he said. Stones, eh? Were they real or virtual?
They didn't hit me but they hurt my feelings.
Ah, well, they were spiritual, then, the worst kind. It was one of that sort that brought darkness to Goliath.
In Furber's opinion the new man had small management of words, little imagination, no gift for preaching, and a narrow chest, but from his bed, Furber heard a boisterous choir, and the lusty voice of his replacement leading. This determined him to slip what he called Henry Pimber's hanging money in one of Mr. Huffley's bright new offertory envelopes before he left. 🔗