Thesis Thoughts: A Parable

Garland. Garland. The Great God Garland. The Rise of the American Mystic. Maybe. Disillusioned by the war, America expands beyond her intellectual boundaries. There is Prohibition, and the Black Sox scandal, and it would explain Wilson's paralysis. A vision: Garland expressed them all.

Senior turns on his lamp. 4:30 nighttime. He has been stirred by a comment on the radio, an image in a dream, a nervous fantasy. These are his Thesis Thoughts.

He gets up and walks to his desk, not wearily. In thinking thesis his mind is as alert as when stung by coffee; but he needs no caffeine late at night trying to sleep; early in the ayem his nerves play ping-pong with his psyche.

A clotch of books, paper, notes, and typewriter over-flow the desk. Senior ignores them. By now it's routine. He rips a partly-filled page out of the typewritter, plugs in a fresh sheet and starts to type.

Later that morning or that week he will look back over his Night Thoughts. If he's lucky, his daylight sobriety will expose them as incoherent.

She was just seventeen/You know what I mean...Garland's essential puritanism belongs in the section on isolationism...just seventeen/You know what I mean

Senior's sister had taught him one way to explode a haunting melody. Sing "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb CHOP."

All right then: Mary had a little lamb-chop. He tries it. No go. What a way to get rid of, to get rid of--She was just Seventeen. . .

Finally Senior wages war; he enlists Bach and Miles Davis as steady background artillry. Nevertheless, two or three times a day, with his roommates, he gives in to orgy. The room has a word for it. They Beatleize.

But it's not the Beatles or Night Nerves. It's not the girl who proved no Goddess or the squash match he lost. And his bladder is no more prolific than formerly. One week Senior's roommates buy a dart board. Hours a day they play the same heavy game. Finally, in an act of will, they disregard the board and dismantle the darts. But it's not the dart game either. It's Thesis Thoughts.

Falling asleep again, as he must do every night, no matter how he postpones it, Senior dreams of his typist, a nimble lass who will probably leave out a paragraph or forget the carbon. Or, worst of all, he tosses with the dream of the Great Confrontation, the dream where he passes through life talking to friends, making love, delivering speeches, always searching in vain for the appropriate quote from his intensive study of the complete works of Hamlin Garland.