Read Online Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Helprin
Ads: Link
and the Black Forest to the north, the château sat on a small rise in the middle of a great meadow walled in at its edges by palisades of evergreens as dense as the teeth of a fine-toothed comb and cooler and more fragrant than I can convey from a garden in the hot sun.
The building itself was a graceful construction of monastic stone, with a courtyard in which were fifty thousand geraniums and a round fountain filled to the brim with frigid water newly liberated from the not-so-distant glaciers.
I had never seen a field so wide. I had never been in air so clear. I had never seen snow so pure and white, for as white as is the snow on the Hudson, it is always tinted by the blue of Canada. I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic. France was so distant and purple as it fled to the Atlantic that looking at the world was like gazing through a prism. And I had never been as high as I stood at 3,000 meters, nor so close to the sun, nor so unprotected from its benevolent glory.
I alighted from the cart and went up near the plodding pony so as to walk the rest of the way, to feel every inch of the road that led to a mental institution that I now believe may have been one of the few refuges of sanity in a world everywhere insane.
Though the rector of this institution was no bigger than a Saint Bernard dog, he had about him the aura of power that attaches to people who are gigantic. I immediately felt protective of him, and yet in awe, thinking that not only had he long before finished high schoolâwhich I had yet to enter, and never wouldâand, indeed, college, and then medical school, but the various layers of medical apprenticeship that give one a place on the links for the rest of one's life. It seemed that in Switzerland physicians were more monastic and scholarly, their social standing lower, their intellects better exercised, and their sense of humility sharper than that of their well tailored American brethren.
I took a seat opposite him, hardly able to look away from the snowfields of the Jungfrau, which, though distant, managed to throw their fiery light through his narrow windows and directly into my eye.
"American?" he asked in what I did not then know was a Danish accent.
I nodded.
"Then the first thing I must tell you is that nothing is expected of you."
"Nothing?" I asked.
"Only hard work, study, arising at five, and service in the fields. Nothing more than would be required of a monk, a Roman galley slave, or a virtuous king. In my experience, Americans have always felt the need to amaze everyone. Perhaps that is because the New World is less tired than the Old."
"What about the psychological stuff?" I asked.
"What psychological stuff?"
"You knowâjackets, shocks, expensive interviews."
"We don't go for that sort of thing."
"You don't?"
"No, not at all. Ten years of that isn't worth a month of bringing in the hay."
"You mean this is a 'keep-busy' sort of a place? We have one at the tip of Long Island. It's called the Butterworth sanitarium, and it doesn't work. They go in as walnuts, they exit as coconuts, and they die as pistachios."
"I beg your pardon?" he said, failing to understand my schoolboy slang. I'm not sure I understood it either.
"This isn't a 'keep-busy' place," he continued. "Here you work only five days a week. On weekends, if you wish, you can be overcome with terror,' lethargy, and regret. The idea is not to keep all your plates spinning, but to let them fall."
"Is coffee here?"
"No. Neither coffee, nor tea, nor alcohol, nor tobacco. No drugs of any kind. No excessively fatty or sugared foods. No motor vehicles. No chocolate. No electric lights, no Victrolas, no telephones, no telegraphs, no magazines."
"No coffee?" My lungs felt as if each one had been freed of the intrusion of a cinder block. My neurasthenia began to clear.
"Coffee is the work of the devil," he said. "I am a physician,
The building itself was a graceful construction of monastic stone, with a courtyard in which were fifty thousand geraniums and a round fountain filled to the brim with frigid water newly liberated from the not-so-distant glaciers.
I had never seen a field so wide. I had never been in air so clear. I had never seen snow so pure and white, for as white as is the snow on the Hudson, it is always tinted by the blue of Canada. I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic. France was so distant and purple as it fled to the Atlantic that looking at the world was like gazing through a prism. And I had never been as high as I stood at 3,000 meters, nor so close to the sun, nor so unprotected from its benevolent glory.
I alighted from the cart and went up near the plodding pony so as to walk the rest of the way, to feel every inch of the road that led to a mental institution that I now believe may have been one of the few refuges of sanity in a world everywhere insane.
Though the rector of this institution was no bigger than a Saint Bernard dog, he had about him the aura of power that attaches to people who are gigantic. I immediately felt protective of him, and yet in awe, thinking that not only had he long before finished high schoolâwhich I had yet to enter, and never wouldâand, indeed, college, and then medical school, but the various layers of medical apprenticeship that give one a place on the links for the rest of one's life. It seemed that in Switzerland physicians were more monastic and scholarly, their social standing lower, their intellects better exercised, and their sense of humility sharper than that of their well tailored American brethren.
I took a seat opposite him, hardly able to look away from the snowfields of the Jungfrau, which, though distant, managed to throw their fiery light through his narrow windows and directly into my eye.
"American?" he asked in what I did not then know was a Danish accent.
I nodded.
"Then the first thing I must tell you is that nothing is expected of you."
"Nothing?" I asked.
"Only hard work, study, arising at five, and service in the fields. Nothing more than would be required of a monk, a Roman galley slave, or a virtuous king. In my experience, Americans have always felt the need to amaze everyone. Perhaps that is because the New World is less tired than the Old."
"What about the psychological stuff?" I asked.
"What psychological stuff?"
"You knowâjackets, shocks, expensive interviews."
"We don't go for that sort of thing."
"You don't?"
"No, not at all. Ten years of that isn't worth a month of bringing in the hay."
"You mean this is a 'keep-busy' sort of a place? We have one at the tip of Long Island. It's called the Butterworth sanitarium, and it doesn't work. They go in as walnuts, they exit as coconuts, and they die as pistachios."
"I beg your pardon?" he said, failing to understand my schoolboy slang. I'm not sure I understood it either.
"This isn't a 'keep-busy' place," he continued. "Here you work only five days a week. On weekends, if you wish, you can be overcome with terror,' lethargy, and regret. The idea is not to keep all your plates spinning, but to let them fall."
"Is coffee here?"
"No. Neither coffee, nor tea, nor alcohol, nor tobacco. No drugs of any kind. No excessively fatty or sugared foods. No motor vehicles. No chocolate. No electric lights, no Victrolas, no telephones, no telegraphs, no magazines."
"No coffee?" My lungs felt as if each one had been freed of the intrusion of a cinder block. My neurasthenia began to clear.
"Coffee is the work of the devil," he said. "I am a physician,
Similar Books
