The Symmetry Teacher Read Online Free

and recovers his strength and equanimity and writes a letter, now calmly and quickly, efficiently, but in fact he’s just tracing out wavy lines—like a child painting the sea … Then his neighbor arrives, and they start conferring about a small mutual concern of long standing. They come to an agreement and go to the city of Taunus. And the passage that follows is so strong that I always make a singular effort to grasp the transition, but I just can’t manage—I can no longer find the passage in the book, however much I leaf through it.
    And now it seemed to me that I was standing on the brink of his madness, which whirled around in a vortex, so smoothly, so imperceptibly and seamlessly—a funnel that consciousness pours into like sand—that you don’t even notice how you end up inside it, sliding along the breathtaking mathematical curvature, and peering out of a place from which there is no return …
    “Yes, yes. I understand. That sky,” I said, as though backing up warily within his gaze.
    The old man grinned. “I have grounds to believe that this is the case. You are young … Also, does not the very same sky cover that Troy and this one, and us, and all those who come after us? There you have it, at least in a metaphorical sense.”
    “That’s the truth!” I said, nodding, overjoyed at Vanoski’s return to our mutually accepted stomping grounds of logic.
    “I’m curious why figures of speech—an image, a metaphor—while distancing themselves from their object, seem to approach the truth, whereas the reality surrounding us seems to be senseless, littered with trivia, as though insufficiently generalized and abstract, and therefore untrue. It’s quite the opposite! I don’t think the time has come for you to understand this yet. I can only warn you—and, apparently, in vain. It is hardly likely that my personal experience will be of any use to you. Experience never is. And it’s unlikely that you will meet with such an open-ended fate. In any case, my advice to you is, never agree to any tempting offers. You are a simple and selfless man”—the first epithet jarred me, and I was about to take offense, but at the second I nodded benignly—“and for that reason you accept everything offered to you as a gift, or as an adventure, or as fate. You grab hold of it like an unselfish person who is usually left empty-handed. Refuse any offer—it’s always of the devil. That is why this is the real sky over Troy.”
    This was when he repeated the words of the fat bald man in the Garden Park—and, once again, I failed to understand him. It was also when he said that sending someone packing was always the best bet, and on his face was that look of anguish, a look of “Why did I fail to do it this time, too?”
    “There is something you need from me, for I am certainly not what you need. Rather, you desperately need something you suspect to be here, in my place. Everyone is a tyrant over reality nowadays, a practitioner of progress. Assume, therefore, that I’m no longer here. But since you want something from me (even though I’m not what you need, and this is precisely why I keep the life around me at bay, because I always feel answerable to it), I am now obliged to respond, insofar as you are life, since you have come to me. But since you couldn’t care less about me but are intent upon something you purport to need, I reserve the right to repay you in the only way I can. And this utter imbalance, albeit equal in weight, is the essence of the question and the answer.
    “I will tell you about the picture. I have reason to want to draw closer to it now.” Here again he pretended not to be looking at the button on the wall. “I think about it now unceasingly, so it will be fairly easy for me to relate it to you. Whether you need me to or not is up to you. You came to me yourself, of your own volition, so it’s not at all surprising that I am the one here in front of you—though you are of no