“Other men don’t make such a fuss about it,” he told himself (the self he refused to give up). “Other men are truly happy in obliteration. Why am I suddenly different? Other men desire to be lost, lost, lost. How have I lost the faith of my childhood and manhood? What is unique about me?”
There was no answer to that.
“Whatever is unique about me, I refuse to give it up. I will howl and moan against that extinction for billions of centuries. Ah, I will go sly! I will devise a sign so I will know me if I meet me again.”
About an hour before dawn the Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. came to Dookh-Doctor Drague. The dolcus and the arktos had reported that the man was resting badly and was not properly disposed.
“I have an analogy that may ease your mind, Dookh-Doctor,” the Lay Priest whispered softly, “ease it into great easiness, salve it into great salving—”
“Begone, fellow, your salve has lost its twinkle.”
“Consider that we have never lived, that we have only seemed to live. Consider that we do not die, but are only absorbed into great selfless self. Consider the odd sphairikoi of this world—”
“What about the sphairikoi? I consider them often.”
“I believe that they are set here for our instruction. A sphairikos is a total globe, the type of the great oneness. Then consider that it sometimes ruffles its surface, extrudes a little false-foot from its soft surface. Would it not be odd if that false-foot, for its brief second, considered itself a person? Would you not laugh at that?”
“No, no. I do not laugh.” And the Dookh-Doctor was on his feet.
“And in much less than a second, that pseudopod is withdrawn back into the sphere of the sphairikoi. So it is with our lives. Nothing dies. It is only a ripple on the surface of the oneness. Can you entertain so droll an idea as that the pseudopod should remember, or wish to remember?”
“Yes. I’ll remember it a billion years for the billion who forget.”
The Dookh-Doctor was running uphill in the dark. He crashed into trees and boles as though he wished to remember the crashing forever. “I’ll burn before I forget, but I must have something that says it’s me who burns!”
Up, up by the spherical hills of the sphairikoi, bawling and stumbling in the dark. Up to a hut that had a certain fame he could never place, to the hut that had its own identity, that sparkled with identity.
“Open, open, help me!” the Dookh-Doctor cried out at the last hut on the hill.
“Go away, man!” the last voice protested. “All my clients are gone, and the night is almost over with. What has this person to do with a human man anyhow?”
It was a round twinkling voice out of the roweled dark. But there was enduring identity there. The twinkling, enduring-identity colors, coming from the chinks of the hut, had not reached the level of vision. There was even the flicker of the I-will-know-me-if-I-meet-me-again color.
“Torchy Twelve, help me. I am told that you have the special salve that solves the last problem, and makes it know that it is always itself that is solved.”
“Why, it is the Dookh-Doc! Why have you come to Torchy?”
“I want something to send me into kind and everlasting slumber,” he moaned. “But I want it to be me who slumbers. Cannot you help me in any way?”
“Come you in, the Dookh-Doc. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. I help you—”
THE WORLD AS WILL AND WALLPAPER
Introduction by Samuel R. Delany
Along with “The Primary Education of the Camiroi,” this was one of the first tales by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914–2002) I read.
Where it appeared, however, I have no notion. Possibly that’s because today I know so much more about the intellectual context that informs his story than I did when I first read it, and it is easy to let the context overwhelm the tale. One suspects that is part of the story’s project. But in whose anthology—Judith Merril’s? Terry Carr’s?—I first read this piece, I have no notion at all.
I once taught a Clarion workshop at Tulane (where the students included George R. R. Martin), and I wondered if somehow Lafferty himself might be in evidence. He wasn’t. And the class was in some confusion because the young man who had set up the whole thing had also pulled out at the last minute. It’s interesting that even at that time Lafferty as a myth was so in evidence.
But what of the tale to hand?
William Morris (1834–1896) was intelligent, rich, and multitalented. He was a committed socialist, and the author of a number of fantasies, including News from Nowhere and The World Beyond the Wood. He supported a number of other artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, and he designed ornate wallpapers still used today; as well, he printed sumptuous illustrated editions of books such as the Kelmscott Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is one of the most written-about men of his times, and he is the avatar of the hero of Lafferty’s futuristic tale of a trip through the City of the World.
As much or more than any famous Victorian figure, it’s easy to see how the nature of Morris’s fame is entirely an accident of a social position.
Lafferty’s title riffs on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) two-volume philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer is known for the extreme pessimism of his philosophy and the beauty of his writing.
Like a Wallace Shawn play, Lafferty’s tale takes place in a stressed future and moves from there to its distressing end.
The story begins from a seeming common-sense challenge to the classical description of a city, straight out of Jane Jacobs (“a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained…”) and sets it at the limit of its growth: “The World City is economically self-contained.”
By the story’s end, Lafferty’s own pessimism is running neck and neck with Schopenhauer’s. Lafferty’s Catholicism was a topic often referred to by fans and critics: the other writer who sits in my mind as a (severely lapsed) Catholic is Thomas Disch. And I wonder to what extent that can be read as part of the cultural context that informs both writers.
Lafferty’s is a story of bookies and talkies and readies, where the World City is a tidy place because it tips and tilts with the tides it floats on, and Willy, whose “name game” is based on William Morris, goes to explore with Kandy Kalosh and later Fairhair Farquhar, the World City which is, of course, much too large for them to see more than a fraction of—though what of it that’s revealed, with each narrative move, is more and more distressing.
In all, “The World as Will and Wallpaper” offers a grim view of what a world as it approaches its end times requires to be self-sustaining.
The World as Will and Wallpaper
1.
There is an old dictionary-encyclopedia that defines a City as “… a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained.” The dictionary-encyclopedia being an old one, however (and there is no other kind), is mistaken. The World City is economically self-contained.