“No? I’ve done it for five years or so. I think that all of us secretly live in vacuums, but we use our imaginations to conceal that fact. Words were really invented to hide this essential emptiness.”
“You’re a massive pessimist! The strangest man of twenty-three that I’ve ever seen! If things are so utterly hollow to you, why do you live?”
“In order to persuade myself that I have a reason for living—a defiant entertainment in the presence of an empty theater.... But it’s always futile to defend your reason for living. Tell me, instead, what do you think of your associate, Miss Aldridge?”
“I really think that she treated you a little heartlessly, but at the same time I don’t think that she meant to,” said Clara. “Mary is a woman who grew into the habit of hiding herself from people because so many of those who looked at her youth, at one time, failed to understand it.”
“I can understand that process, though I don’t believe that it applies in her case. It’s a slow and sullen withdrawing from the jibing strangers around you—a wounded desire to meet their walls of misunderstanding with even harder walls of your own. As you grow older, I suppose, the sullenness may change to a well-mannered and hopeless aloofness. Age softens the attitude and, still self-immersed, it seeks the distraction of words.”
“What has happened to make you say this?” asked Clara, with a mistily maternal impulse.
“Just now I’m working in a plumber’s shop, helping the sewers with their sluggish germs of future turbulence,” said Carl, “and that, of course, can play its part in the making of a pessimist.... But tell me what you think of my work?”
“Plumbing or poetry?”
“Both of them are interwoven.”
“Your poems are stiff and dimly tinted, like a row of plaster-of-paris dolls standing on a dusty and venerated shelf. Don’t you see? You talk about twenty times better than you write, and I can’t understand this peculiar incongruity. Perhaps you’ve been taught that poetry is something that must be ethereal and noble at all costs, and perhaps you’ve been inarticulate because the rest of you has been at war with this one illusion. I don’t feel that you’ve looked upon poetry as a place where you could express your actual thoughts and feelings.”