The Best of Gene Wolfe

Now as it happened, the registrar was a woman approaching retirement age, and after registration, for twelve regular semesters and six summer semesters, Dr. Insula came to her to ask whether anyone had registered for his seminar. And there came a time, not in fall but rather in that dreary tag end of summer when it is ninety degrees on the sidewalk and the stores have Halloween cards and the first subtly threatening Christmas ornaments are on display, when she could bear it no longer.

She was bending over her desk making up the new catalog (which would be that last one she would ever do), and though the air-conditioning was supposedly set at seventy-eight, it was at least eighty-five in her office. A wisp of her own gray hair kept falling over her eyes, and the buzz of the electric fan she had bought herself, with her own money, kept reminding her of her girlhood and of sleeping on the screened porch in Atlanta when Mommy and Daddy took her to visit relatives.

And at this critical moment, the hundredth, perhaps, in a long line of critical moments, she came to the section labeled “Miscellaneous” at the very end of the catalog proper, just before the dishonest little biographies of the faculty. And there was Dr. Insula’s NO CREDIT seminar on islands.

A certain madness seized her. Why, mistakes happen all the time, she thought to herself. Why, only last year, the printer changed that lab of Dr. Ettelmann’s to Monday, Grunday, and Friday. Besides, NO CREDIT can’t possibly be right. Who would take a No-credit seminar on islands? Anyway, they really ought to run the airconditioning if they want us to work efficiently.

Almost before she knew it, her pencil had made a short, sharp, vertical line in the Credit Hours column, and she felt a great deal cooler.

So it was that that year when Dr. Insula came to inquire she was able to tell him, with some satisfaction, that two students—a young man and a young woman, as she said, judging from their names, as she said—had in fact enrolled in his seminar.

And when the young man, and later the young woman, came to the Registrar’s Office to ask just where the Friday afternoon seminar on islands was to be held and one of her subregistrars (who naturally did not know) brought them to see her, she was able to explain—twice and with almost equal satisfaction—where it would be. For the good old custom of holding undergraduate seminars in faculty living rooms had fallen so much out of use at the university that Dr. Insula himself and the old registrar were almost the only people who recalled it.

Thus it came to be, on a certain September afternoon when the leaves were just beginning to change from green to brown and red-gold, that the young man and the young woman walked up Dr. Insula’s gritty and rather overgrown walk, and up Dr. Insula’s cracked stone steps, and across Dr. Insula’s shadowy, creaking porch, to knock at Dr. Insula’s water-spotted oak door.

He opened it for them and showed them into a living room that might almost have been called a parlor, so full it was of the smell of dust, and mementos of times gone by, and stiff furniture, and old books. There he seated them in two of the stiff chairs and brought out coffee (which he called java) for the young man and himself, and tea for the young woman. “We used to call this Ceylon tea,” he said. “Now it is Sri Lanka tea, I suppose. The Greeks called it Taprobane, and the Arabs Serendib.”

The young man and woman nodded politely, not quite sure what he meant.

There was Scotch shortbread too, and he reminded them that Scotland is only the northern end of the island of Great Britain, and that Scotland itself embraces three famous island groups, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides. He quoted Thomson to them:

Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

Then he asked the young man if he knew where Thule was.

“It’s where Prince Valiant comes from in the comic strip, I think,” the young man said. “But not a real place.”

Dr. Insula shook his head. “It is Iceland.” He turned to the young woman. “Prince Valiant is supposed to be a peer of Arthur’s realm, I believe. You will recall that Arthur was interred on the island of Avalon. Can you tell me, please, where that is?”

“It is a mythical island west of Ireland,” the young woman said, that being what they had taught her in school.

“No, it is in Somerset. It was there that his coffin was found, in 1191, inscribed: Hic jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futuris. Avalon was also the last known resting place of the Holy Grail.”

The young man said, “I don’t think that’s true history, Dr. Insula.”

“Why it’s not accepted history, I suppose. Tell me, do you know who wrote True History?”

“No one writes true history,” the young man said, that being what they had taught him in school. “All history is subjective, reflecting the perceptions and unacknowledged prejudices of the historian.” After his weak answer about Prince Valiant, he was quite proud of that one.

“Why, then my history is as good as accepted history. And since there really was a King Arthur—he is mentioned in contemporary chronicles—surely it’s more than probable that he was buried in Somerset than in some nonexistent place? But True History was written by Lucian of Samosata.”

He told them of Lucian’s travels to Antioch, Greece, Italy, and Gaul, and this led him to speak of the ships of that time and the danger of storms and piracy, and the enchantment of the Greek isles. He told them of Apollo’s birth on Delos; of Patmos, where Saint John beheld the Apocalypse; and of Phraxos, where the sorcerer Conchis dwelt. He said, “ ‘To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man to paradise.’ ” But because it did not rhyme, the young man and the young woman did not know that he was quoting a famous tale.

At last he said, “But why is it that people at all times and in all places have considered islands unique and uniquely magical? Can either of you tell me that?”