“That’s right,” Kidd said with reserve and curiosity. He wished Newboy would go on, silently, to the poems.
“Publishers, editors, gallery owners, orchestra managers! What incredible parameters for the creative world. But it is a purgatorially instructive one to walk around in with such a wound as ours. Still, I don’t believe anybody ever enters it without having been given the magic Shield by someone.” Newboy’s eyes fell again, rose again, and caught Kidd’s. “Would you like it?”
“Huh? Yeah. What?”
“On one side,” intoned Newboy with twinkling gravity, “is inscribed: ‘Be true to yourself that you may be true to your work.’ On the other: ‘Be true to your work that you may be true to yourself.’” Once more Newboy’s eyes dropped to the page; his voice continued, preoccupied: “It is a little frightening to peer around the edge of your own and see so many others discarded and glittering about in that spiky landscape. Not to mention all those naked people doing all those strange things on the tops of their various hills, or down in their several dells, some of them—Lord, how many?—beyond doubt out of their minds! At the same time—” he turned another page—“nothing is quite as humbling, after a very little while, as realizing how close one has already come to dropping it a dozen times oneself, having been distracted—heavens, no!—not by wealth or fame, but by those endless structures of logic and necessity that go so tediously on before they reach the inevitable flaw that causes their joints to shatter and allow you passage. One picks one’s way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists’ smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora. At any rate, they make every object from axletrees to zarfs and finjons cast the most astonishing shadows.” Mr. Newboy glanced up again. “Perhaps you’ve followed some dozen such lights to their source?” He held the page between his fingers. “Admit it—since we are talking as equals—most of the time there simply wasn’t anything there. Though to your journal—” he let the page fall back to what he’d been perusing before—“or in a letter to a friend you feel will take care to preserve it, you will also admit the whole experience was rather marvelous and filled you with inadmissible longings that you would be more than a little curious to see settle down and, after all, admiss. Sometimes you simply found a plaque which read, ‘Here Mozart met da Ponte,’ or ‘Rodin slept here.’ Three or four times you discovered a strange group heatedly discussing something that happened on that very spot a very long time by, which, they assure you, you would have thoroughly enjoyed had you not arrived too late. If you can bear them, if you can listen, if you can learn why they are still there, you will have gained something quite valuable. ‘For God’s sakes, put down that thing in your hand and stay a while!’ It’s a terribly tempting invitation. So polite themselves, they are the only people who seem willing to make allowances for your natural barbarousness. And once or twice, if you were lucky, you found a quiet, elderly man who, when you mumbled something about dinner for him and his slightly dubious friend, astounded you by saying, ‘Thank you very much; we’d be delighted.’ Or an old woman watching the baseball game on her television, who, when you brought her flowers on her birthday, smiled through the chain on the door and explained, ‘That’s very sweet of you boys, but I just don’t see anyone now, anymore, ever.’ Oh, that thing in your hand. You do still have it, don’t you?”
“Sir, maybe if—?”
Newboy moved his hand, looked back down. “It starts out mirrored on both sides: initially reassuring, but ultimately distracting. It rather gets in the way. But as you go on, the silvering starts to wear. Now you can see more, and more, directly through. Really—” Newboy glanced up quickly, then returned his eyes to the page—“it’s a lens. The transition period is almost always embarrassing, however. While you are still being dazzled with bits of your own reflection, you begin to see that it might, after all, be one-way glass—with a better view afforded from out there! Still, once used to it, you find the view more interesting. With only a little practice, you get so you can read both legends at once, without having to stop what you’re doing to turn the thing around. Oh, and how many, many times you came close to clashing into someone you thought buck-naked only to find his Shield had grown transparent as your own. You become chary of judging too quickly who still has, and who has discarded, his. And when some youngster, glitteringly protected, through malice or, worse, some incomprehensible vision of kindness, shouts up at the dreadfully stark crag on which you happen to be panting, or down into the fetid ravine from which you are manfully trying to clamber with only one arm free, ‘You’re naked, don’t you understand?’ you may, momentarily, squint to make sure the double legend is still etched before you, but you are not liable to waste much energy setting him straight unless your own vision of kindness is as incomprehensible as his. There are more important things to do. As best you can, you go about doing them. But things still interrupt: now your eyes are deviled by a recurrent, polychrome flash. You try to ignore it. But its frequency increases. From habit, you check the cut runes to make sure. But, frankly, during the moments of illumination, it is practically impossible for you to read them, much less decide whether they still contain sense. The thing you have been baring, not to mention staring through all this time, has become an immense prism.” Newboy leaned back now, his eyes somewhere on the underside of the balcony. “Did I say the first transition was embarrassing? This one is monstrous. And it is the same fear: one-way glass! If only you didn’t remember all those other, endless, elderly ladies with their water color sets, the old men with their privately printed poems, whom one had, out of politeness, brought flowers for or invited out to dinner, as well, even though their heads were wrapped in tin foil and they babbled ceaselessly about Poetry and Truth. After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. You even could discern two or three of the proper letters among the foil folds, admittedly cut from cardboard and taped there with sticking plaster. Are all these humbling fireworks some sort of cruel second childhood, a defect in the eye: You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own—never deny that for an instant—it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn’t. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned—was it before you began?—the terrifying fact that had you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heaclass="underline" indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been—and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs—and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority—that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all.”