The Moviegoer by Walker Percy Page A

promenade.
    â€œAfter Germany I insisted on going back to England. I wanted to see the Lake Country again.”
    â€œDid Father go?”
    â€œJack? Heavens no. He met two of his buddies from Charlottesville and Princeton and they took off helter-skelter up the Rhine. Off he went with a bottle of Liebfraumilch under one arm and Wilhelm Meister under the other.” (But they do not fit, I think for the hundredth time: your student prince and the ironic young dude on the mantel.)
    â€œJack,” she says in a different voice and immediately the Black Forest is two thousand miles away and forty years ago.
    â€œYes ma’am.” My neck begins to prickle with a dreadful-but-not-unpleasant eschatological prickling.
    We take up our promenade. My aunt steps carefully, lining up her toe with the edge of the boards. She presses a finger against her lip, but it is not possible to tell whether she is smiling or grimacing.
    â€œI had a brainstorm last night. It still looked reasonably good this morning. How does this strike you?”
    â€œWhat?” My neck prickles like a bull terrier.
    â€œLast week at Great Books I had a chat with old Dr Minor. I didn’t bring your name up. He did. He asked me what you were doing with yourself. When I told him, he said it was a shame because—and there was no reason for him to say this if it weren’t true—you have a keen mind and a natural scientific curiosity.”
    I know what she is going to say. My aunt is convinced I have a “flair for research.” This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I’m not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded—and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else—I am a genius whom ordinary professions can’t satisfy. I tried research one summer. I got interested in the role of the acid-base balance in the formation of renal calculi; really, it’s quite an interesting problem. I had a hunch you might get pigs to form oxalate stones by manipulating the pH of the blood, and maybe even to dissolve them. A friend of mine, a boy from Pittsburg named Harry Stern, and I read up the literature and presented the problem to Minor. He was enthusiastic, gave us everything we wanted and turned us loose for the summer. But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads—now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. By the middle of August I could not see what difference it made whether the pigs got kidney stones or not