Free The Magus, A Revised Version by John Fowles Page A

dominate my life. The school became a convenient scapegoat – how could one compose flawless verse if one was surrounded by futile routine?
    But then, one bleak March Sun day, the scales dropped from my eyes. I read the Greek poems and saw them for what they were: undergraduate pieces, without rhythm, without structure, their banalities of perception clumsily concealed under an impasto of lush rhetoric. In horror I turned to other poems I had written-at Oxford, in East Anglia. They were no better; even worse. The truth rushed down on me like a burying avalanche. I was not a poet.
    I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin. Taking all the poems I had ever written, page by slow page, I tore each one into tiny fragments, till my fingers ached.
    Then I went for a walk in the hills, even though it was very cold and began to pour with rain. The whole world had finally declared itself against me. Here was something I could not shrug off , an absolute condemnation. One aspect of even my worse experiences had always been that they were fuel, ore; finally utilizable, not all waste and suffering. Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need – an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification. Now I was in the sea, and the lifebuoy had sunk, like lead. It was an effort not to cry tears of self-pity. My face set into a stiff mask, like that of an acroterion. I walked for hours and I was in hell.
    One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, pingo, ergo sum. For days after I felt myself filled with nothingness; with something more than the old physical and social loneliness – a metaphysical sense of being marooned. It was something almost tangible, like cancer or tuberculosis.
    Then one day, not a week later, it was tangible: I woke up one morning and found I had two sores. I had been half expecting them. In late February I had gone to Athens, and paid another visit to the house in Kephissia. I knew I had taken a risk. At the time it hadn ’ t seemed to matter.
    For a day I was too shocked to act. There were two doctors in the village: one active, who had the school in his practice, and one, a taciturn old Rumanian, who thoug h semi-retired still took a few patients. The school doctor was in and out of the common-room continually. I couldn ’ t go to him. So I went to see Dr Patarescu.
    He looked at the sores, and then at me, and shrugged.
    ‘ Felicitations, ’ he said.
    ‘ C ’ est … ’
    ‘ On va voir ç a à Ath è nes. Je vous donnerai une adresse. C ’ est bien à Athènes que vous l. avez attrap é , oui ?’ I nodded. ‘ Les poules l à -bas. I nfectes. Seulement les f ous qui s ’ y laissent prendre. ’
    He had an old yellow face and pince-nez; a malicious smile. My questions amused him. The chances were I could be cured; I was not contagious but I must have no sex, he could have treated me if he had had the right drug, benzathine penicillin, but he could not get it. He had heard one could get it at a certain private clinic in Athens, but I would have to pay through the nose; it would be eight weeks before we could be sure it had worked. He answered all my questions drily; all he could off er was the ancient arsenic and bismuth treatment, and I must in any case have a laboratory test first. He had long ago been drained of all sympathy for humanity, and he watched me with tortoise eyes as I put down the fee.
    I stood in his doorway, still foolishly trying for his sympathy.
    ‘ Je suis maudit. ’
    He shrugged, and showed me out, totally indifferent, a