“Oh, it’s late,” she would exclaim, and the evening was ended.
Each evening he sat there submissively, his eyes fixed on the fire, and as his mother’s voice flowed on, broken now and again by laughter or a long sigh of remembrance, he enjoyed in himself the ability to see what she was saying. That is, as she finished describing an incident now long past, he saw it all as clearly as though taking place before him. He was aware of this ability, for as he read a book, whatever it was—and this had been always true ever since he could remember, or so it seemed to him—he saw what he read, and not the words or the pages on which they were printed. The ability had been of special value to him in school, always, and especially in mathematics, for when a problem was presented by his teacher or the textbook, he saw not the figures but the situation they presented and the relationship to the whole, so that he was ready with the answer immediately. Sciences, too, had been made very easy for him by this ability to visualize simultaneously as he read or listened.
So now he saw his father as his mother told of her life with him as a young man. It was actual seeing. He had this ability that he supposed everyone had, until he discovered later on in his life that it was unique, and that he could actually see, in shape and solidity, a person or an object of which he was thinking. As his mother described his father, he saw the tall young man, fair-skinned, fair-haired, quick to laugh but always ready to listen and to wonder. He had never told anyone of this visual ability, but now he told his mother.
“I see my father as he was, before I was born.”
His mother stopped and gazed at him, questioning.
“He walks very fast, doesn’t he? Almost running? He’s very thin but strong. And he had a little clipped mustache, hadn’t he?”
“How did you know?” his mother cried. “He did have a mustache when we first met, and I didn’t like it, and he shaved it off and never let it grow again.”
“I don’t know how I know, I don’t know how I see, but I know so well that I see.”
His mother looked at him wistfully and in awe, and she waited.
“Sometimes,” he went on almost unwillingly, “I think it is not good.”
“For example?” she inquired when he paused.
“Well, in school, for example, especially in math, the teachers thought I was cheating when we were doing mental arithmetic. But I could see. I wasn’t cheating.”
“Of course not,” his mother said.
He did not notice it then, and it was not until years later that he thought of it, but from this time on his mother told him no more of his father. She devoted herself to him, usually in a silence that was almost awe. She paid heed to his food, preparing him the most nourishing meals she could devise, and was anxious that he had sufficient sleep. But he forgot her. His mind was crowded with visions of creations. His thoughts were always of creations. But he ate voraciously, for his body was beginning to grow very fast. Until now he had been a boy of medium height. Suddenly, or so it seemed to him, he was nearly six feet tall, though he was not yet thirteen. He was so tall that it seemed to him he got in his own way. There was one advantage to this extreme height. It made him less conspicuous at the college. His face was still a boy’s face, but his bones were gangling, and he was as lean as a big bird, and still he held his head high.
HIS PROBLEM WAS THE ETERNAL question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. He felt restrained and repressed. He sat in his college classes, holding himself in, forbidding himself the luxury of impatience with the slowness, the meticulousness of his teachers.
“Oh, get on,” he muttered under his breath, his teeth clenched, “get on—get on.”
He envisioned what they meant before they had finished a point. His imagination obsessed him. The very atmosphere was floating with ideas. He had so many ideas in the course of a day that he bewildered himself. How could he bring them into focus? What was this imagination of his, continually busy with creation but uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable? At least, he did not yet know how to control it and could not know until his will directed and compelled him to control his imagination.
So far as he could discover, none of his classmates suffered as he did. He had no friends, for mere friendliness, and he was by instinct eagerly friendly, did not mean friendship. He felt, at times, that he was in a desert alone, a desert of his own making merely because he was as he was. He had long ago outgrown his mother and he had almost ceased to think of his father. He was totally absorbed in the problem of himself and what direction he should give himself. He lived in absolute loneliness for most of his time at college.
One day in his third year, a chance remark of his professor in psychology class caught his attention.
“Most people,” the professor said, “are merely adaptive. They learn as animals learn—a chimpanzee rides a bicycle, a mouse follows a maze. But now and then a man is born who is more than adaptive. He is creative. He may be a problem to himself, but he solves his problems through his imagination. Once his problems are solved, his mind is free to create. And the more he creates, the more free he is.”
A sudden light broke across Rannie’s mind. He sought out the professor after the class, lingering until every other student had left the classroom.
“I’d like to talk with you,” he told the professor.
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” the professor said.
“I SHAN’T BE HOME THIS evening,” he told his mother. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sharpe. He’s expecting me. I may be late—it depends.”
“Depends on what?” his mother asked.
She had a quiet, penetrative way of asking questions. He looked at her, thinking not of her but of her question.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t know how the talk will go. If I don’t learn anything from it, I’ll be home early. If I do, I’ll be late.”
He ate his evening meal in the silence of abstraction. They had continued to eat their meals in the kitchen. While his father lived this meal had been the one formal occasion of the day, always set in the dining room. Breakfast was a brief pause at the kitchen table, luncheon a random sandwich, but his father liked the grace of dining at night with a change of garments, a table set with silver and china and a bowl of flowers. The dining room had never seemed too large for the three of them, but alone with his mother it was too large, too empty.
“I don’t know Dr. Sharpe very well,” his mother was saying.
“Neither do I, really,” he replied. “It’s good to have someone young with fresh ideas. I’ve known the other professors all my life, it seems. They’re all right, of course, but—”
His mind took over again and he fell silent. His mother prodded him.
“But what?”
“But what?” he repeated. “Only that I like having something new. Especially if it’s something I am already thinking about.”
“And that is?…”
He glanced at his mother’s questioning face and smiled, half shyly, “I don’t know—creativity, I suppose!”
Half an hour later he was in Donald Sharpe’s small living room. They were alone, for Sharpe was a bachelor and kept his own house, except for a cleaning woman once a week. It was a charming room, decorated with taste and design. Two French paintings, in the style of the Old Masters, hung on facing walls, and on a third, opposite the chimney piece, was a Japanese scroll. An easy chair covered in old gold velvet was on each side of the fireplace. The autumn was late autumn, the evenings were chill, and a wood fire scented the room.