there was absolutely no spectral link between myself and the smalls—not as I understood my friend’s father to have used these words. If anything, it was exactly the opposite. The small people were drastically alien to me. I was derided by my parents as a shameful little bigot because of my fear of them and my hatred of them, feelings that I had not known to exist in anyone else besides my friend, and vicariously through him his father—and his mother, too, it seemed, who I believe had also gone the way of the rest of my friend’s family. But where they had gone I couldn’t bring myself to ponder.
While continuing to be afraid of the smalls and to hate them, I now transferred these emotions with a rabid vehemence toward the half-smalls, who my friend added sometimes devolved—or whatever the proper term might be—in both appearance and nature into small people through and through. Following this transformation, which they might not even know was possible or consider desirable—there was nothing for them to do except move into small country and live among their kind, that is, if they didn’t regard this prospect as so repellent that they took other measures rather than lose the sense of who they were, or thought they were, and what they were, or thought they were. With its small people, this world just seemed a preposterous mess to me, and now it was revealed to be even worse than I knew. Why couldn’t things be different? What would it take for our lives to make some kind of sense? Maybe that’s just not possible, I thought. Maybe any world would be just as preposterous. Yet the existence of the half-smalls nevertheless still inspired in me a crawling fear, a new unseen horror, as I’ve mentioned having this sensation in dreams, along with a hatred of them for having what I thought was a weakness connecting them in some spectral manner with the small people. At least the latter were something of a phenomenally known quantity to my mind, however little I understood about them. But the halfers were something else—interlopers in a world where they didn’t belong, the source of all questions about who or what human beings might be as a life form. For as tiresome as it has become, the question of what it means to be human continues to fervently preoccupy us—because without that definition we cannot positively know if our laborious self-perpetuation is worth the candle we keep lit in the blackness of the universe. We cannot decide whether we should continue or terminate the human race, if there is anything that might be called the human race, since we are as fragmented in the aggregate as we are as individuals—things of parts and not the integrated organisms we represent to ourselves. All the same, as naïve and arrogant as this may sound, I felt that my sensibility enabled my insight into this immemorial affair. I thought of this sensibility as a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.
From this point on, as I walked the streets of the town where I lived, I could see only how contrary everything was to the picture of it I was psychologically strong-armed into having. Now the place where I grew up was no more than another preposterous mess. The town’s motto on the sign as you entered Main Street was: “A Good Place to Live”—not exactly a boastful statement. In actuality, though, it was pretty crummy. Not crummy in itself, I should say, because I had never lived in any other towns. They might be as crummy as my native town. The whole planet might be crummy for all I knew then. When I looked closely at the city hall, for instance, I could see it was wobbly. Maybe at one time I would have thought nothing of walking through the wide front doors of the place. Now that my eyes could see that they tilted quite visibly, I wouldn’t have entered its space on a dare. Or take the post office. If my mother had ordered
While continuing to be afraid of the smalls and to hate them, I now transferred these emotions with a rabid vehemence toward the half-smalls, who my friend added sometimes devolved—or whatever the proper term might be—in both appearance and nature into small people through and through. Following this transformation, which they might not even know was possible or consider desirable—there was nothing for them to do except move into small country and live among their kind, that is, if they didn’t regard this prospect as so repellent that they took other measures rather than lose the sense of who they were, or thought they were, and what they were, or thought they were. With its small people, this world just seemed a preposterous mess to me, and now it was revealed to be even worse than I knew. Why couldn’t things be different? What would it take for our lives to make some kind of sense? Maybe that’s just not possible, I thought. Maybe any world would be just as preposterous. Yet the existence of the half-smalls nevertheless still inspired in me a crawling fear, a new unseen horror, as I’ve mentioned having this sensation in dreams, along with a hatred of them for having what I thought was a weakness connecting them in some spectral manner with the small people. At least the latter were something of a phenomenally known quantity to my mind, however little I understood about them. But the halfers were something else—interlopers in a world where they didn’t belong, the source of all questions about who or what human beings might be as a life form. For as tiresome as it has become, the question of what it means to be human continues to fervently preoccupy us—because without that definition we cannot positively know if our laborious self-perpetuation is worth the candle we keep lit in the blackness of the universe. We cannot decide whether we should continue or terminate the human race, if there is anything that might be called the human race, since we are as fragmented in the aggregate as we are as individuals—things of parts and not the integrated organisms we represent to ourselves. All the same, as naïve and arrogant as this may sound, I felt that my sensibility enabled my insight into this immemorial affair. I thought of this sensibility as a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.
From this point on, as I walked the streets of the town where I lived, I could see only how contrary everything was to the picture of it I was psychologically strong-armed into having. Now the place where I grew up was no more than another preposterous mess. The town’s motto on the sign as you entered Main Street was: “A Good Place to Live”—not exactly a boastful statement. In actuality, though, it was pretty crummy. Not crummy in itself, I should say, because I had never lived in any other towns. They might be as crummy as my native town. The whole planet might be crummy for all I knew then. When I looked closely at the city hall, for instance, I could see it was wobbly. Maybe at one time I would have thought nothing of walking through the wide front doors of the place. Now that my eyes could see that they tilted quite visibly, I wouldn’t have entered its space on a dare. Or take the post office. If my mother had ordered
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