Free Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

cannon. This involved everything I had learned about physics, metallurgy, chemistry, geometry, and geology (I had to mine my own metals, make my own tools, build my own buildings). Unfortunately, to get the grasshoppers, I had to destroy the whole city. My answer was only hypothetical. How was I to know that it would become the underlying logic of the rest of the twentieth century?
    Every day, the rector would present such a problem—sometimes purely scientific, sometimes technological, poetic, historical, political, or aesthetic, and often a combination of several of these. His queries were always interesting and often ingenious. Even when they were fruitless, the many frustrating approaches that we followed toward their unobtainable solution made such problems immensely entertaining. He might say, "You are to write a sonnet after Shakespeare, in French, using the rules of Italian prosody," or he might drop me into the forests of northern Canada and instruct me (all in theory, of course) to survive the winter and construct a coliseum of snow and walrus bones.
    Where I erred, he corrected; when I was lost, he showed me the beginning of the way. My favorite problems were the short imperatives: "Solve the problems of Revolutionary France." (First I had to figure out what they were.) "Design an electrical machine for the flawless generation of music." This I did, in theory, and many years later in Brazil I encountered what are called synthesizers, and I smiled. "Develop the economy of Egypt." I had a good plan: they didn't follow it. "Tell me what this is," he would say, handing me a flask of goo. Having committed to memory many of the techniques of qualitative and quantitative analysis, I would return in a few days with a list of components in their absolute and proportionate quantities.
    All this while doing hard labor in the fields, rising at five, climbing ice-clad peaks, and cutting and hauling firewood. As if to confirm that life is the academy of fate, the only question he asked more than once was, as usual, in the form of a command. In fact, he presented me with the same challenge four or five times, and each time I took a few days to make an intricate plan. His exhortation was, "Rob the Bank of England."
    In Paris at the several cafés in which I had lingered in my straitjacket, with Spinney, I had seen women dressed according to the fashions of the times. Their hair was carefully coifed, their faces made up, their fingers lasciviously adorned with rings, their necks with necklaces, their wrists with bracelets. I assumed—from what the rector had told me about her beauty, and because she was a Parisienne—that Miss Mayevska would be an exemplar of such seductive arts. I assumed that she would be able to afford the silk, perfume, and gold that can so magnify a woman's natural beauty, for after all, Château Parfilage was one of the most expensive mental institutions in western Switzerland. But though I had heard her gorgeous transcriptions, often in my dreams, for several months before I actually met her, I hadn't had the slightest idea of Miss Mayevska until I saw her face. Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.
    This does not prejudice my affection for Marlise, but I have loved Marlise solely according to the tropical paradigm, which means that in our sweat-filled, screaming, gasping, semihallucinatory dalliance we have achieved a certain intimacy. Our flesh and fluids have been pressed, mixed, or imbibed with such vigor that at times we have been unsure which one of us was or was not the other.
    But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since August of 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.
    At first I fell in love with her merely because of the rector's suggestion. It is easy to fall in love that way, but it is also easy to fall out. Then it was after I heard her own transcription