"There still is a lot of criticism of Patron," she said. "So much it makes me realize how much more vicious the attacks must have been ten years ago.
Every time some article lambasting him was sent to us I always asked Guide for his opinion, but now with things the way they are… "One famous retired journalist writes the most abusive, scathing things, but I don't pay him any mind. I'd say the problem's more with the person who's writing than with anything to do with Patron. Recently we received a copy of a university bulletin that contained an interview between a Protes- tant theologian and an associate professor who'd just joined the same church.
Overall it was typical overbearing criticism of Patron, the main point being their agreement that since Patron had abandoned his own church, the only way he'd be saved was to join a proper church.
"I told Patron about this, and he said he wants to keep apart from all established churches, Protestant, Catholic, or whatever. Every person has that right, he said. If he were to share the same certainty in an objective external God with the other members of a church, his critics included, he said, he might very well lose his faith entirely. Instead of climbing into the same bed of faith with these people, he said he much preferred a gnashing of teeth and the uncertainty of belief, lying over seventy thousand fathoms, where he could taste the reason he was living in this world… "What I wanted to ask you, Professor, was what did he mean by over seventy thousand fathoms? I asked him, but he just said you mentioned it in one of your talks. Is the phrase from one of Thomas's poems?"
Dancer stopped speaking, her lips slightly parted as usual, and gazed at the artist.
"It's originally from Kierkegaard," Kizu replied, "though Thomas used it several times. I do remember linking the phrase with the poetry and dis- cussing Kierkegaard with Patron. This wasn't directly from Thomas's po- etry collections, but something from a volume published to commemorate the poet's eightieth birthday… this book, in fact. The author of the text I chose discusses the metaphorical uses Thomas has in his poems for the desolate farmland and sea in Wales… The author quotes two poems; the latter, en- titled "Balance," directly mentions Kierkegaard. Let's take a look at it."
No piracy, but there is a plank to walk over seventy thousand fathoms, as Kierkegaard would say, and far out from the land. I have abandoned my theories, the easier certainties of belief. There are no handrails to grasp. I stand and on either side there is the haggard gallery of the dead, those who in their day walked here and fell. Above and beyond there is the galaxies' violence, the meaningless wastage of force, the chaos the blond hero's leap over my head brings him nearer to.
Is there a place here for the spirit? Is there time on this brief platform for anything other than the mind's failure to explain itself?
"After this poem of Thomas's, the author quotes at length from Kierkegaard's writings. Shall I translate it for you?"
Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual's inwardness and the objective un- certainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objec- tive uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thou- sand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.
"So that's what it means. Patron was quoting Kierkegaard," Dancer said, sounding for all the world like the intelligent heroine in some drama. "Patron jokes around at the most unexpected times, so often I don't know what he's really getting at. But even when he's joking, I think he's suffering over ques- tions of faith. I get the same feeling from those words of Kierkegaard. Thank you for helping me understand. I'm so happy I had a chance to talk with you."
Despite his years, Kizu felt buoyant-the same sort of happiness he felt when students had come to his office back at the university to ask pointed questions and then listen in rapt awe as he gave a detailed response.
Kizu had Dancer stay a little longer and showed her Thomas's collec- tion of poems to accompany a series of paintings, from Impressionist paint- ings to the work of the Surrealists. This book, a birthday present sent by the head assistant back at his home office, differed from both the paperback and collected works edition, for it contained vivid full-color plates of the paint- ings. Kizu found it odd as he watched her, the contrast between the way she gazed, open-mouthed, at the plates, and the nimbleness and efficiency with which she had earlier bustled about wiping away Patron's saliva. She still had a touch of the child about her, he realized.
In the evening, uncertain about when Ikuo was to return, Kizu went ahead and began preparing a stew. As he'd learned to do in America, he'd bought various cuts of beef and frozen the unused portions. Now, to use these leftovers, he cut them up and put them in a pot with water, celery, carrots, and onions-leftover vegetables from the bottom shelf of his refrigerator. The stew was just beginning to bubble when Kizu tasted it and decided that, all things considered, it could do with a pinch more salt. His chipper feelings from talking with Dancer were still with him as he tapped the plastic salt shaker smartly against the cutting board to loosen the lumps of salt inside. The salt shaker, it turned out, wasn't plastic but glass, and it shattered, a shard of glass cutting deeply into his right wrist.
The only doctor Kizu could think of was the well-known cancer spe- cialist his institute had introduced him to so, at his wits' end, he called the apartment superintendent, who advised him to go to a hospital in Rop- pongi where Kizu's university had a special arrangement. Kizu rushed off to the hospital in a taxi and, for the first time since his operation for intes- tinal cancer, had stitches taken in his skin. If this were your left wrist, the blunt physician remarked, hoping to be funny, you'd have some explaining to do.
Ikuo was still out when Kizu returned to his apartment. The pain in his wrist bothered him-making him consider the deeper pain that was sure to come from his cancer-so he went about cleaning up the kitchen to take his mind off it. Inside the brass sink there was one large pinkish drop of his blood.
Kizu couldn't shake off thoughts of his cancer, his mind drifting to how fragile his body was. When you consider the eternal soul, though, he thought, which links humanity's past, present, and future, the fragility of the body is of little consequence. Instead, it should be a sign pointing the way for people to overcome the individual ego. The eternal soul, connect- ing the far-off Stone Age with some perhaps purgatorylike future Electronic Age. But did he have faith in the soul? The closest thing to faith he had, he decided, with a sinking feeling, were the thoughts that arise from these very emotions.
In the end he gave up on the stew, making do with a can of Campbell's tomato soup and some large crackers that he ate in the living room. The illustrated poetry collection and the research books he'd shown Dancer were still on top of the small table. He picked up the book with the essay compar- ing Thomas and Kierkegaard, and flipped through an essay by a woman scholar on the poetry collection.
In a pedantic tone the woman noted that the word ingrowing was a key term for Thomas, that he was well aware that if one thought too long about something, there was the danger of one's thoughts becoming too narrow and closed in. As Yeats puts it, she wrote, "Things thought too long can be no longer thought, for beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth."
Thomas, then, wrote the poems that accompany the paintings in order to rescue himself from his own narrow way of thinking as a poet. At this point the author embarked on her main theme, an analysis of Thomas's poem on the famous René Magritte painting showing a boot changing, at the tip, into a human foot.