The Immersion Library

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were – I have not seen
As others saw – I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.
Then – in my childhood – in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold –
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by –
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

I descended the stairs of the lecture hall, brimming with anxiety and insecurity. Countless students and countless seats; nearly all filled with excited bodies that smiled and whose chatter swelled and slumped like a static clamor.

I found a seat nearest to the aisle and nestled my hands between my legs, swiveling my head in all directions as if validating the success of my stealth. No one looked in my direction. But my own gaze seared a hole through my mind.

As I peered behind me, back to the auditorium entrance doors, I saw him. A cowering figure lingering in the shadow of a protruding wall. As the crowds ruckus disipated and the clock’s minute-hand passed the twelve, he stepped to the aisle and walked down the stairs under the flourecent lights. His dark countenance, dimmed by a black mustache and sunken eyes, contrasted his large, pasty forehead; an amiable disproportion.

He reached the pit of the hall and paced from one side of the audience to the other, never facing them. But has his stride never slowed, he broke his silence with a resounding voice. His lecture began with scientific analyses of hot air balloons voyaging to the moon, the efficacy of mesmerism, the deductive prowess of his friend August Dupin, the validated and absolute definition of poetry, and and a thetic treatise qualifying living inhumation as the most horrifying of all human experiences. While he spoke, my mind sputtered between the method of his analyses, the fastidiousness of his arguments and the subjects of which he spoke – I found myself both mesmerized by the speaker and the subjects separately and simultaneously.

When students began rustling in their seats, he moved into satirical attacks; particularly on literary aspirants who, coincidentally, filled the lecture hall. I wanted to laugh, but could not make any sound at all; with the forces of his intellect and the humor of his subject equally applied on both sides. I asked myself if literature, philosophy, science, and drama classes had conjoined for the day. That would certainly explain the crowded auditorium.

As darkness enveloped the day, I observed the professor walking down the street into the neighborhood. I followed. He looked to either side of himself as he walked; rarely behind and usually down rather than forward. He would flinch at raven caws and barking dogs, and quicken his pace when the wind picked up.

When reaching his home, he entered and strode immediately into a front room visible through a bay window. During my vigil, as he wrote at a modest desk, I observed a composure which I had not yet witnessed from the professor. Even from my distance I could see his muscles relax and his focus sharpen. The crows and dogs did not disturb him. He sat and wrote for hours, purging his mind, relieving himself of the load which bloated within his brain from the beginning of the day. I noted certain hand gestures, lifting his right hand and swaying it back and forth like a pedulum, reaching down and recoiling from thin air as if from boiling water.

Once fully cleansed, he rose from his solace and looked straight ahead at photographs hanging on the wall. After only a brief period, a gloom again sank into the recesses of his face. His forehead began to gleam. Turning away from his desk, I thought I recognized a slight but growing despair. It differed from the anxious look of fear he had before. Instead, it appeared like a countenance of realized failure, of a goal unacheived, a yearning unfulfilled. But the professor also looked unhappily familiar with the feeling.

He extinguished the lights in the house and ascended the stairs to the second story in darkness. I turned to walk back towards the campus, looking forward to his next lecture – less interested in the subjects, and more interested in the man.