FROM THE ACADEMY
439
understanding can lead to paralysis, and it can lead to self-understand–
ing, which is even more paralyzing. The ploughman of the MLA, turn–
ing up the soil of other men's imaginations, judged not people but Pro–
duction. The system worked marvelously well.
In a moment that group had dissolved, and others were taking its
place; but not before I saw Icarus. Icarus stood against the wall, lighted
by indirect lighting which glowed against the plaster round his head,
like the water in which he was drowning. He was already madder than
the rest, the ultimate isolated figure. His eyes never had focused quite
well, in spite of the glasses he wore, and now they seemed unable to
focus on the procession before his eyes. He thus seemed to be looking
through the Mezzanine, rather than at it, as though the whole scene
were as transparent and as dark as the sea. I had seen him at many
conventions, and each time he wore a tag with the name of a different
school on it. He was not over thirty, a little man with delicate bones
and a non-Anglo-Saxon name. He was thin as a sparrow and could
never have flown very near the sun, even at his best. His face was
comic, with close-set, almost crossed, eyes behind the fogged glasses, and
a little Hitler moustache, a crowning gesture of irony and self-hate,
growing on his lip. I had met him before and had listened to his voice,
a dry sparrow chirping about literature and ideas, in the previous year's
Mezzanine where very few people were truly interested in either. But
Icarus was not for this world, and the world was right not to be inter–
ested in him, right to turn its back on him. Anyone with a hope of
joining the grand procession or dancing at the wedding feast had al–
ready been forced to let his own Icarus drop into the sea within him–
self and bend his back to his own plough, sail his own ship toward a
port less important than the sun. I watched him vanish; I saw the white
legs slip into the water. He must have gone home.
As
I moved through the corridors I came on other kinds of paint–
ings; the whole Mezzanine for a while seemed to be a gallery where the
truths of life as known to the old masters were on display. A kind old
man who had been my most beloved professor stood in a deserted sec–
tion of corridor, his back to a bulletin board crowded with notices of
meetings and advertisements of publishers. It was the reverse of a Rem–
brandt portrait; his face was in shadow while the whole background
glowed
wtih
artificial light. The inner light is difficult to see in the
Mezzanine; even under the best conditions it is concealed behind satur–
nine countenances, and the eyes through which it gazes on the world
are apt to be sunk in a network of wrinkles. Nor do such eyes glow as
novelists and painters imagine; after a lifetime of reading they tend to
