Free The Quest of the Artist: A Sci-Fi novella by Phil Semler Page B

are. Successful or unsuccessful, paid or unpaid—all meaningless concepts—they would still be distinct and separate from the people around them, they would still create and work.
    So after that night’s frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies, the erring, forsaken, martyred, Kroger sobbed with nostalgia and remorse. Here in his room it was still and dark, but from below in the large meeting room, life's rhythms came faintly to his ears.
    Even when society, class, and wealth inequity have been destroyed, we can still say that manners and conventions permeate society and play a dominant role in our relationships to one another. That is a necessary part of our social reality as humans, this world of signs and symbols by which we recognize one another and allow our fellow humans to categorize us as friends, as enemies, as indifferent entities passing through. But he would play the role and he would continue to produce art. That’s what his heart told him.
    Kruger sat up in the room, composing his promised letter to Lisa Ivanova. In the letter from Kruger to Ivanova, delivered by an itinerant, Kruger at last revealed he’d “come to terms” with his position in life as a “burgher who’s gone astray in art”—even using the word “burgher”  and he admitted he in truth did connect his love of the “normal” condition with that love of life, an idea that was often received as a welcome idea from Ivanova.
     
    “Dear Lisa,
    You probably still remember you called me a burgher, a bourgeois man. Or as I prefer to call it, a normal man. You called me that after, led on by other confessions I previously let slip to you. I confessed to you my love of life, or what I call life. I ask myself if you were aware how very close you came to the truth, how much my love of  ‘life’ is one and the same thing as my being a normal. This journey of mine has given me time to ponder the subject.
     
    My father, you know, had the Chinese temperament: solid, reflective, puritanically correct, with a tendency to melancholy. My mother, of Mexican blood, was beautiful, sensuous, naïve, passionate, and careless. The mixture was extraordinary and contained extraordinary dangers. The issue of it, a normal who strayed off into art, a rebellious artist who feels nostalgic yearnings for the easy life, an artist with a bad conscience. For surely it is my father’s conscience that makes me see in the artist life, in all irregularity and all genius, something profoundly suspect , profoundly disreputable; that fills me with this lovelorn weakness for the simple and good, the comfortably normal, the average respectable human being—what you call bourgeois.
     
    I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. A real artist would call me a normal, and the normal try to arrest me... I don't know which makes me feel worse. The normal are stupid but necessary, and artists... But you adorers of the new world , who call me apathetic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.
     
    I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and demonic beauty and despise ‘mankind,’ but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a maker of art, a painter, it is my “normal” love of the human , the living and the usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humor.
     
    As I write, the ocean bay breezes whisper to me and I close my eyes. I look into an empty and sick world unborn and formless, that needs to be ordered and shaped; I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave spells to redeem them: tragic and laughable figures and some that are both together—and to these I am. The work I have so far done is nothing or not