Erik Dorn | Page 3

complete. This
business of being empty is all there is to life. Intelligence is a faculty
which enables man to peer through the muddle of ideas and arrive at a
nowhere."
Private introspection had become a bore to him. What was the use of
thinking if there was nothing to think about? And there was nothing.
His violences of temper, his emotions, definite and at times compelling,
had always seemed to him as words--pretences to which he loaned
himself for diversion. He was aware that neither ideas nor
prejudices--the residues of emotion--existed in his mind. His thinking,
he knew, had been a shuffle of words which he followed to fantastic
and inconsistent conclusions that left him always without convictions
for the morrow.
There was a picture in the street for him on this summer morning. He
was a part of it. Yet between himself and the rest of the picture he felt
no contact.
Into this emptiness of spirit, life had poured its excitements as into a
thing bottomless as a mirror. He gave it back an image of words. He
was proud of his words. They were his experiences and sophistications.

Out of them he achieved his keenest diversion. They were the excuse
for his walking, his wearing a hat and embarking daily for his work,
returning daily to his home. They enabled him to amuse himself with
complexities of thought as one improvising difficult finger exercises on
the piano.
At times it seemed to Dorn that he was even incapable of thinking, that
he possessed a plastic vocabulary endowed with a life of its own. He
often contemplated with astonishment his own verbal brilliancies,
which his friends appeared to accept as irrefutable truths of the moment.
Carried away in the heat of some intricate debate he would pause
internally, as his voice continued without interruption, and exclaim to
himself, "What in hell am I talking about?" And a momentary awe
would overcome him--the awe of listening to himself give utterance to
fantastic ideas that he knew had no existence in him--a cynical
magician watching a white rabbit he had never seen before crawl
naïvely out of his own sleeve. Thus his phrases assembled themselves
on his tongue and pirouetted of their own energy about his listeners.
Smiling, garrulous, and impenetrable--garrulous even in his silences, he
daily entered his office and proceeded skillfully about his work. He was,
as always, delighted with himself. He felt himself a man ideally fitted
to enjoy the little spectacle of life his day offered. Emotion in others
invariably roused in him a sense of the ludicrous. His eyes seemed to
travel through the griefs and torments of his fellows and to fasten
helplessly upon their causes. And here lay the ludicrous--the clownish
little mainspring of tragedy and drama. He moved through his day with
a vivid understanding of its excitements. There was no mystery. One
had only to look and see and words fitted themselves. A pattern twisted
itself into precisions--precisions of men loving, hating, questing. The
understanding swayed him between pity and contempt and left the
balance of an amused smile in his eyes.
Intimacy with Erik Dorn had meant different things to different people,
but all had derived from his friendship a fascinated feeling of loss. His
wife, closest to him, had after seven years found herself drained,
hollowed out as by some tenaciously devouring insect. Her mind had

emptied itself of its normal furniture. Erik had eaten the ideas out of it.
Under the continual impact of his irony her faiths and understandings
had slowly deserted her. Her thought had become a shadow cast by his
emptiness. Things were no longer good, no longer bad. People had
become somehow non-existent for her since she could no longer think
of them as symbols incarnate of ideas that she liked or ideas that she
disliked. Thus emptied of its natural furniture, her mind had borrowed
from her heart and become filled, wholly occupied with the emotion of
her love for Erik Dorn. More than lover and husband, he was an
obsession. He had replaced a world for her.
It was of his wife that Dorn was thinking when he arrived this summer
morning at his desk in the editorial room. He had remembered suddenly
that the day was the anniversary of their marriage. Time had passed
rapidly. Seven years! Like seven yesterdays. He seemed able to
remember them in their entirety with a single thought, as one can
remember a column of figures without recalling either their meaning or
their sum.
CHAPTER III
The employees of the editorial room--a loft-like chamber crazily
crowded with desks, tables, cabinets, benches, files, typewriters;
lighted by a smoke-darkened sun and the dim glow of electric
bulbs--were already launched upon the nervous routine of their day. An
excited jargon