yellow tiles. At a landing another corridor led off to the left, lighted by small, widely spaced lamps that somehow suggested a forest. They moved in and out of darkness as they walked.
“The symptoms you’ve seen so far are pretty typical. Delusions, hallucinations, motor excitement, dementia, catatonia, mania, and so on. But pay attention now.”
He stopped under a frosted-glass lamp at an ordinary door with a handle and lock.
They entered a small, airy room with a bed against the wall, a few white chairs, and a table with an orderly stack of thick books on top. Numerous sheets of paper crumpled into balls lay on the floor. A man in violet pajamas with silver stripes sat with his back to the door. When he turned around, Stefan recalled a photograph from an illustrated magazine. He was a tall man, almost handsome, but putting on weight that was obscuring his sharp, regular features. He had prominent eyebrows flecked with gray like his temples, and his eyes looked bright, lively, and strong, capable of staring relentlessly, now vacant with relaxation. They were colorless, and picked up the hues of their surroundings. They were light now. The poet’s skin, pale from his confinement indoors, seemed almost transparent; under his eyes it sagged into barely perceptible pockets.
“Allow me to introduce my colleague, Doctor Trzyniecki,” Staszek said. “He’s come to work with us for a while. An excellent participant in discussions of ideas.”
“But only as a dilettante,” said Stefan, pleased at Sekulowski’s brief, warm handshake. They sat. It might have looked strange: two men in white coats, stethoscopes and hammers sticking indiscreetly out of their pockets, and an older man in wild pajamas.
They chatted about this and that for a while, and then Sekulowski remarked, “Medicine can offer a pretty good window on infinity. Sometimes I regret not having studied it systematically.”
“You are speaking with an expert on psychopathology,” Staszek said to Stefan, who noted that his friend was more restrained and rigid than usual. He’s trying his best, Stefan thought.
Stefan said that no one had yet written a novel about medicine believably depicting the profession.
“A scribbler’s job,” the poet said, smiling politely but dismissively. “A mirror to everyday life? What does that have to do with literature? By that view, doctor—contrary to what Witkacy says—the novel would be the art form of the peeping Tom.”
“I was thinking of the whole complexity of the profession… the transformation of a person who enters the halls of the university knowing people only on the outside and… comes out a doctor.”
He knew that sounded stupid. To his unpleasant surprise, Stefan realized that he was having trouble formulating his thoughts and choosing his words, that he was confused, like a freshman in front of a professor, even though he felt no awe of Sekulowski.
“It seems to me that we have no more knowledge of our bodies than of the most distant star,” the poet said quietly.
“But we are discovering the laws that govern the body.”
“Not until the majority of biological theses have their antitheses. Scientific theory is intellectual chewing gum.”
“But allow me to ask,” Stefan replied, slightly impatient. “What did you do when you were sick?”
“I called the doctor.” Sekulowski smiled. His smile was as bright as a child’s. “But when I was eighteen years old, I realized how many morons became doctors. Since then I have had a panicky fear of illness, because how can you entrust your body to someone more stupid than yourself?”
“Sometimes that’s best. Haven’t you ever felt like confiding things you would conceal from those closest to you, to the first stranger that comes along?”
“And who, according to you, is close?”
“Well, your parents, for instance.”
“Mommy and Daddy know best?” Sekulowski asked. “Parents are supposed to be close? Why not the coelacanth? After all, your biology teaches us that they are the first link in the chain of evolution, so why shouldn’t intimacy extend to the whole family, lizards included? Do you know anyone who ever conceived a child with a warm thought to its future intellectual life?”
“Well, what about women?”
“You must be joking. The sexes deal with each other out of complicated motives, probably a consequence of some twisted protein that lacked something here and had something sticking out there, but how do we get from there to closeness? To intellectual closeness. Is your leg close to you?”
“What does my leg have to do with it?” Stefan could see that he wasn’t holding up his end; Sekulowski was batting the conversation around like a ball with a racket.
“Everything. Your leg is obviously close, because you can experience it in two ways, with your eyes closed as a ‘conscious feeling of possessing a leg,’ and when you look at it or touch it—in other words, as an object. Unfortunately, no other human being is ever more than an object.”
“That’s absurd. Surely you don’t mean to say that you’ve never had a friend, that you’ve never loved?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Sekulowski exclaimed, “Let’s assume that I have. But what does that have to do with closeness? No one can be closer to me than I am to myself, and sometimes I am a stranger to myself.”
He lowered his eyelids heavily, as if resigning from the world. This conversation was like wandering in a labyrinth. Stefan decided to persevere and do his best. It might be fun.
“But your literature is no bargain. One takes hold of words too one-sidedly and glosses over details…”
“Go on,” the poet encouraged him.
“A literary work is a matter of conventions, and talent is the ability to break them. I’m not saying it has to be realism. Any literary style can be good, provided the author respects the internal logic of the work. If you have your hero walk through a wall once, you have to let him do it again…”
“Excuse me, but what is the purpose of literature, as you see it?” Sekulowski asked softly, as if he were falling asleep.
But Stefan had not finished; the interruption confused him and he lost his train of thought.
“Literature teaches…”
“Oh really?” The poet sighed. “And what does Beethoven teach?”
“What does Einstein teach?”
Stefan’s impatience now bordered on irritation. Sekulowski definitely had an overblown reputation. Why go easy on him?
The poet smiled quietly, very satisfied. “Nothing, naturally,” he said. “He’s playing, friend. Except that some people don’t know it. Turn on a light every time you give a dog a piece of kielbasa, and after a while the dog will salivate at the sight of the light. Show a man enough ink scrawled on paper, and after a while he’ll say it is a model for the universe. It’s neurology, obedience school, that’s all.”
“What’s the kielbasa in that example?” Stefan asked quickly, feeling like a fencer scoring a touch. But Sekulowski was not slow with his riposte.
“Einstein, or some other worthy authority, is the kielbasa. Isn’t mathematics a form of intellectual tag? And logic, chess played by the strictest rules. It’s like that child’s game with string, where two players twist it around their fingers in artful combinations, adding more and more twists until they come back to the starting point. Have you ever seen Peano and Russell’s proof that two plus two is four? It takes up an entire dense page of algebraic symbols. Everybody is playing, and so am I. Have you seen my play
Stefan did not know the play.
“Forgive me for talking about myself,” the poet said. “But each of us, after all, is a kind of blueprint for the world. The trouble is that the plan is not always well executed. An awful lot of bungling goes into the making of human beings. And the world,” he said, looking down through the window as if he saw something amusing, “is just a collection of the most fantastic oddities, whose existence no one can explain. The easiest thing, of course, is to make believe you don’t see anything, that whatever is, simply is. I do it myself all the time. But it isn’t enough. I cannot remember the exact figure—my memory is failing these days—but I once read the odds of one living cell
