again, and immediately – and surely to a certainty this time – fell asleep. George left her like that, and went out round the screen. There was nobody, he noticed, attending upon the ringing of a bell.
He returned to the Pig Market – more properly the Proscholium – and showed his newly acquired passport. After that, everything was reassuringly familiar. Or at least it was so for a time. Soon, however, he realised that – at least in the common or garden working parts of the Bodleian – almost nothing was quite the same. There were fine displacements virtually wherever he turned, and these progressively confused him. Every day there must be numerous scholars from the ends of the earth who had to find what they wanted through a process of trial and error. Nevertheless, he felt that his own uncertainties must be attracting attention. Nothing was quite where it had been. Suddenly he felt something almost symbolical in this. His life was now going to be like that. Nothing quite where it had been.
‘Over -hardy ,’ he heard his own voice saying to himself. ‘Over- hardy .’ He came to a halt before some irrelevant catalogue. Why ever should such words bob up in his mind? For a moment he knew only that his memory was again behaving badly. Then he recalled Mrs Archer and her citation of Milton’s large-limbed Og, and he was so amused that he laughed aloud. This was not at all the thing in the Bodleian. Moreover, since it was the middle of the vacation, there were very few young people around, and the place seemed exclusively frequented by aged and desiccated persons, all deep scholars without a doubt, who looked as if they hadn’t heard a laugh for years; had in fact forgotten about laughter altogether; and were now in some alarm, occasioned by the fallacious impression that George must have been taken ill.
This was unnerving, and George somehow wasn’t helped by the fact that he was quite a deep scholar himself. It was almost certain that nobody in the Bodleian at this moment knew half as much about Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa as he did. Nor, it soon seemed to him, did anybody anywhere else. Eutychian studies – his rummagings in bibliographies and check-lists soon revealed – were in almost total desuetude. Dom. Potter of Minnesota had switched to Ebionitism. Prebendary Delver had ratted too, and had produced three volumes on Patripassianism, that fond persuasion that the Logos is to be identified with the Father. The man at Gottingen was still at it, but had switched from Marx to Freud as the best illuminant on theological disputation in the sixth century. The Gottingen man was called Gottschalk – which oddly enough had been the name, George recalled, of a particularly desperate heretic in the age of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Various ecclesiastical synods had attempted to wallop his errors out of the original Gottschalk, but rods had no better success than argument, and the wretched man had died still proclaiming whatever his particular nonsense had been. George wondered whether the current Gottschalk would have the guts for that.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Lucretius’ hackneyed but inexpugnable line, George reminded himself, told only half the story. There was a great deal to be said for religion, and it was a pity that he himself had got in such a mess about it. But he wouldn’t get out of the mess by nostalgic potterings in the driest dust of the thing. Surely among all these millions of books there must be a work that spoke to his condition more effectively than Gottschalk II? As he asked himself this question, something rather absurd came into his head. He had never read Robert Elsmere! Mr Gladstone had – and, following Mr Gladstone, pretty well all England in the year 1888 or thereabout. Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere was a novel said to present with extraordinary skill the plight of an intelligent Anglican clergyman upon being confronted with the dire findings of what was then
He returned to the Pig Market – more properly the Proscholium – and showed his newly acquired passport. After that, everything was reassuringly familiar. Or at least it was so for a time. Soon, however, he realised that – at least in the common or garden working parts of the Bodleian – almost nothing was quite the same. There were fine displacements virtually wherever he turned, and these progressively confused him. Every day there must be numerous scholars from the ends of the earth who had to find what they wanted through a process of trial and error. Nevertheless, he felt that his own uncertainties must be attracting attention. Nothing was quite where it had been. Suddenly he felt something almost symbolical in this. His life was now going to be like that. Nothing quite where it had been.
‘Over -hardy ,’ he heard his own voice saying to himself. ‘Over- hardy .’ He came to a halt before some irrelevant catalogue. Why ever should such words bob up in his mind? For a moment he knew only that his memory was again behaving badly. Then he recalled Mrs Archer and her citation of Milton’s large-limbed Og, and he was so amused that he laughed aloud. This was not at all the thing in the Bodleian. Moreover, since it was the middle of the vacation, there were very few young people around, and the place seemed exclusively frequented by aged and desiccated persons, all deep scholars without a doubt, who looked as if they hadn’t heard a laugh for years; had in fact forgotten about laughter altogether; and were now in some alarm, occasioned by the fallacious impression that George must have been taken ill.
This was unnerving, and George somehow wasn’t helped by the fact that he was quite a deep scholar himself. It was almost certain that nobody in the Bodleian at this moment knew half as much about Jacobus Baradaeus of Edessa as he did. Nor, it soon seemed to him, did anybody anywhere else. Eutychian studies – his rummagings in bibliographies and check-lists soon revealed – were in almost total desuetude. Dom. Potter of Minnesota had switched to Ebionitism. Prebendary Delver had ratted too, and had produced three volumes on Patripassianism, that fond persuasion that the Logos is to be identified with the Father. The man at Gottingen was still at it, but had switched from Marx to Freud as the best illuminant on theological disputation in the sixth century. The Gottingen man was called Gottschalk – which oddly enough had been the name, George recalled, of a particularly desperate heretic in the age of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Various ecclesiastical synods had attempted to wallop his errors out of the original Gottschalk, but rods had no better success than argument, and the wretched man had died still proclaiming whatever his particular nonsense had been. George wondered whether the current Gottschalk would have the guts for that.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. Lucretius’ hackneyed but inexpugnable line, George reminded himself, told only half the story. There was a great deal to be said for religion, and it was a pity that he himself had got in such a mess about it. But he wouldn’t get out of the mess by nostalgic potterings in the driest dust of the thing. Surely among all these millions of books there must be a work that spoke to his condition more effectively than Gottschalk II? As he asked himself this question, something rather absurd came into his head. He had never read Robert Elsmere! Mr Gladstone had – and, following Mr Gladstone, pretty well all England in the year 1888 or thereabout. Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere was a novel said to present with extraordinary skill the plight of an intelligent Anglican clergyman upon being confronted with the dire findings of what was then
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