Mr. Sammler's Planet [antikvár]

ONE Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normál sky, Mr. Artúr Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter mucii to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to hus-bands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, col-leagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own sonl, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the stracture, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear ont the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natura! knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstractures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly. The eye closed briefly. A Dutch drudgery, it oc-curred to Sammler, pumping and pumping to keep a