Free The Eternal Wonder by Pearl S. Buck Page A

the tall young man, fair-skinned, fair-haired, quick to laugh but always ready to listen and to wonder. He had never told anyone of this visual ability, but now he told his mother.
    “I see my father as he was, before I was born.”
    His mother stopped and gazed at him, questioning.
    “He walks very fast, doesn’t he? Almost running? He’s very thin but strong. And he had a little clipped mustache, hadn’t he?”
    “How did you know?” his mother cried. “He did have a mustache when we first met, and I didn’t like it, and he shaved it off and never let it grow again.”
    “I don’t know how I know, I don’t know how I see, but I know so well that I see.”
    His mother looked at him wistfully and in awe, and she waited.
    “Sometimes,” he went on almost unwillingly, “I think it is not good.”
    “For example?” she inquired when he paused.
    “Well, in school, for example, especially in math, the teachers thought I was cheating when we were doing mental arithmetic. But I could see. I wasn’t cheating.”
    “Of course not,” his mother said.
    He did not notice it then, and it was not until years later that he thought of it, but from this time on his mother told him no more of his father. She devoted herself to him, usually in a silence that was almost awe. She paid heed to his food, preparing him the most nourishing meals she could devise, and was anxious that he had sufficient sleep. But he forgot her. His mind was crowded with visions of creations. His thoughts were always of creations. Buthe ate voraciously, for his body was beginning to grow very fast. Until now he had been a boy of medium height. Suddenly, or so it seemed to him, he was nearly six feet tall, though he was not yet thirteen. He was so tall that it seemed to him he got in his own way. There was one advantage to this extreme height. It made him less conspicuous at the college. His face was still a boy’s face, but his bones were gangling, and he was as lean as a big bird, and still he held his head high.
     
    HIS PROBLEM WAS THE ETERNAL question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. He felt restrained and repressed. He sat in his college classes, holding himself in, forbidding himself the luxury of impatience with the slowness, the meticulousness of his teachers.
    “Oh, get on,” he muttered under his breath, his teeth clenched, “get on—get on.”
    He envisioned what they meant before they had finished a point. His imagination obsessed him. The very atmosphere was floating with ideas. He had so many ideas in the course of a day that he bewildered himself. How could he bring them into focus? What was this imagination of his, continually busy with creation but uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable? At least, he did not yet know how to control it and could not know until his will directed and compelled him to control his imagination.
    So far as he could discover, none of his classmates suffered as he did. He had no friends, for mere friendliness, and he was by instinct eagerly friendly, did not mean friendship. He felt, at times, that he was in a desert alone, a desert of his own making merely because he was as he was. He had long ago outgrown his mother and he had almost ceased to think of his father. He was totally absorbed in the problem of himself and what direction he should give himself. He lived in absolute loneliness for most of his time at college.
    One day in his third year, a chance remark of his professor in psychology class caught his attention.
    “Most people,” the professor said, “are merely adaptive. They learn as animals learn—a chimpanzee rides a bicycle, a mouse follows a maze. But now and then a man is born who is more than adaptive. He is creative. He may be a problem to himself, but he solves his problems