Henry woke up, and at once he realized he didn’t believe in his theories anymore. Curse it!
The familiar veil of the world had now been cast a strange pall. What comforts he had now tasted of falseness. Utterly false — lies?
Was he to live as he did always? Since when had the better part of Henry lived under the clutch of alien ideas? Did Jennifer, his wife, the stupid hag, loved such a blind idiot? Does she know who he truly is? Does Henry know himself?
Stupid ideas? Why, they were prodigious. Henry at once felt a looming revelation of his incurable mediocrity. Prodigious though they may be, his ideas felt as external to his soul as the blunt object of his study desk. Nay, as disintegrated they were, his ideas were intangible and elusive. Without even a noticeable decadence, the intellectual products of Henry bid farewell on one blue morning, and eschewed any attempts of retrieval.
Hmm, ideas, theories and presumptions — Henry’s bosom blushed with darkness. The world was an oblivion and every step a fall into an ever zooming chasm. What bloody ideas? Henry couldn’t for the world recall any! Ugh, Napoleon, something or other about the primacy of honesty, and …
Henry exerted his most in wrestling with his addled brain. Whatever maneuver exhausted only his spirits, and he was swallowed in the torrent of his own disorientation. No ground to grasp, and no hand to grab— damned comedy of existence, no substance to his essence at all! At once, Henry was lost in the dim recesses of the abstract, though distant even from his logos. Where was he?
Each instance of being a question. The moment to moment continuous agent of his consciousness an act of asking. Asking, asking, asking — is it even proper to ask? The stuff of his soul tossed and turned, seeking rest and thus ever restless. Henry bent down to catch the shadows if his thought, and who knows when, he was suddenly beside that Henry, admiring the stupidity of the afterimage, only to turn and see them both from afar. Which one was he? All three? Or is Henry the Henry who is asking now? Now? Now?
He knew that game bore no fruit, and loathed the curse of being. “I command my faculties to be at rest! Retire! I beg of you!…”
Jennifer strode in with coffee, and Henry’s pipe, only to find him at his study desk, still in his dressing gown, deeply engrossed in his writing. Jennifer knew she had married a man of ideas, and that they are happiest when tortured by ideas. She knew Henry had never lost himself, for the very reason he chronically suffered from theoretical anguish — and thus she’d loved Henry, and loves no one but Henry, for always.
