Free Is That What People Do? by Robert Sheckley

prospect.
    “Well, well,” Lind began, rubbing his hands briskly together. “I’ve heard about you and your invisible merchandise.”
    “And I’ve heard about you,” the Mnemone said, with a touch of malice to his voice. “Do you have business with me?”
    “Yes, by God, I do!” Lind cried. “I want to buy some of your fancy old words.”
    “I am genuinely surprised,” the Mnemone said. “Who would ever have dreamed of finding a law-abiding citizen like yourself in a situation like this, buying goods which are not only invisible, but illegal as well!”
    “It’s not my choice,” Lind said. “I have come here only to please my wife, who is not well these days.”
    “Not well? I’m not surprised,” the Mnemone said. “An ox would sicken under the workload you give her.”
    “Man, that’s no concern of yours!” Lind said furiously.
    “But it is,” the Mnemone said. “In my profession we do not give out words at random. We fit our lines to the recipient. Sometimes we find nothing appropriate, and therefore sell nothing at all.”
    “I thought you sold your wares to all buyers.”
    “You have been misinformed. I know a Pindaric ode I would not sell to you for any price.”
    “Man, you can’t talk to me that way!”
    “I speak as I please. You are free to take your business somewhere else.”
    Mr. Lind glowered and pouted and sulked, but there was nothing he could do. At last he said, “I didn’t mean to lose my temper. Will you sell me something for my wife? Last week was her birthday, but I didn’t remember it until just now.”
    “You are a pretty fellow,” the Mnemone said. “As sentimental as a mink, and almost as loving as a shark! Why come to me for her present? Wouldn’t a sturdy butter churn be more suitable?”
    “No, not so,” Lind said, his voice flat and quiet. “She lies in bed this past month and barely eats. I think she is dying.”
    “And she asked for words of mine?”
    “She asked me to bring her something pretty.”
    The Mnemone nodded. “Dying! Well, I’ll offer no condolences to the man who drove her to the grave, and I’ve not much sympathy for the woman who picked a creature like you. But I do have something she will like, a gaudy thing that will ease her passing. It’ll cost you a mere thousand dollars.”
    “God in heaven, man! Have you nothing cheaper?”
    “Of course I have,” the Mnemone said. “I have a decent little comic poem in Scots dialect with the middle gone from it; yours for two hundred dollars. And I have one stanza of a commemorative ode to General Kitchener which you can have for ten dollars.”
    “Is there nothing else?”
    “Not for you.”
    “Well…I’ll take the thousand dollar item,” Lind said. “Yes, by God, I will! Sara is worth every penny of it!”
    “Handsomely said, albeit tardily. Now pay attention. Here it is.”
    The Mnemone leaned back, closed his eyes, and began to recite. Lind listened, his face tense with concentration. And I also listened, cursing my untrained memory and praying that I would not be ordered from the room.
    It was a long poem, and very strange and beautiful. I still possess it all. But what comes most often to my mind are the lines
    Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
    We are men: queer beasts with strange appetites. Who would have imagined us to possess a thirst for the ineffable? What was the hunger that could lead a man to exchange three bushels of corn for a single saying of the Gnostics? To feast on the spiritual—this seems to be what men must do; but who could have imagined it of us? Who would have thought us sufferers of malnutrition because we had no Plato? Can a man grow sickly from lack of Plutarch, or die from an Aristotle deficiency?
    I cannot deny it. I myself have seen the results of abruptly withdrawing an addict from Strindberg.
    Our past is a necessary part of us, and to take away that part is to mutilate us irreparably. I