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undigested in my stomach.
    There is, after this, an illumination, an area of local bodily sensation, random and ephemeral, one following another, as a corollary, perhaps, an inscrutable hint, to the time-space fix itself—an intense warmth just above the heart, then something, an alertness, say, in the cells of the thigh; an ache in the shoulder, answered in a vertebra, and back again to the shoulder . . . and in the club, in the high, thick-soled boot, a tingling
    “Daddy! Daddy!”
    It is Jenifer, and her voice conveys alarm. I localize myself, search out the condition that she has discovered, and realize that, for some moments, I have been gazing at her, altogether oblivious to her. I glance for a moment at the room, open the senses: the old woodwork painted white, the warm air, the food smells. Turning to Jenifer—a smile, a word, a gesture, and she is restored. The dinner begins to move once more.
    But eating I recall the medical student, interning in obstetrics, who made a custom of talking to newborn infants, presenting simple requests such as “open your eyes,” “raise your right hand,” or the like, and claimed remarkable results—the nurses liked to have him around, said he could quiet the mostirritated or soothe the most feverish child;—pursuing his research, he developed a strange look, began to study philosophy and religion, and left medicine abruptly for divinity school.
    One of the greatest pleasures of this house is the presence in it of the old chimney. In a fit of modernizing, Mother once wanted to cover it with wallboard, but I protested, successfully. A great mass of stone and mortar, it centers and roots the house; and, although all the fireplaces except the one in the livingroom have been sealed, portions of it appear, the stonework obtruding, refusing to be hidden, in nearly every room. Sitting at the table, now, observing the corner of it that appears in the kitchen, the sealed flue opening before which the old black cookstove used to sit, I am reminded of Melville’s I A ND M Y C HIMNEY —and of the engineers, when we put in the furnace, telling me that the old chimney couldn’t be used, a new one would have to be built, the flue wouldn’t work—and of how I argued and persisted, with the result that now the stones impart flue heat—heat that would otherwise be wasted—to every room of the house, and even the long, narrow attic, running the length of the house, the attic where I keep my desk and books, the husbanding of Melville and medicine, history and archeology, even the attic is made livable, on a stormy spring night, by virtue of heat radiant from the old stones.
    The children have begun the nightly chore of cleaning up the table and washing the dishes—spreading the job, fluctuant between dishwater and television. The day’s manifest obligations having been met, it is not difficult for me to ascend the two flights to the attic—the heavy foot following the light, and then leading it—to meet, to face, to examine, perhaps, some of the other obligations, such as
    Item: a Post-mortem: to understand my brother Carl
    and
    Item: for the living, myself and others, to discover what it is to heal, and why, as a doctor, I will not.

TWO
               “Save the prairie-hen, sometimes startled from its lurking-place in the rank grass; and, in their migratory season, pigeons, high overhead on the wing, in dense multitudes eclipsing the day like a passing storm-cloud; save these—there being no wide woods with their underwood—birds were strangely few.
               “Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor—no geologist—to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.