Grendel: Chapters 4–5

The boy observes him, tall and solemn, twelve years older than the night he first crept in with his stone-eyed master.

He sent to far kingdoms for woodsmen, carpenters, metalsmiths, goldsmiths—also carters, victualers, clothiers to attend to the workmen—and for weeks their uproar filled the days and nights.

I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle.

My heart was light with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways.

“He reshapes the world,” I whispered, belligerent.

His manner of speaking was infecting me, making me pompous.

“He takes what he finds,” I said stubbornly, trying again. “And by changing men’s minds he makes the best of it. Why not?” But it sounded petulant; and it wasn’t true, I knew.

His fingers picked infallibly, as if moved by something beyond his power, and the words stitched together out of ancient songs, the scenes interwoven out of dreary tales, made a vision without seams, an image of himself yet not-himself, beyond the need of any shaggy old gold-friend’s pay: the projected possible.

I could feel it all around me, that invisible presence, chilly as the first intimation of death, the dusty unblinking eyes of a thousand snakes.

As a matter of fact, if the Shaper’s vision of goodness and peace was a part of himself, not idle rhymes, then no one understood him at all, not even Hrothgar.

I lay there listening to the indistinct memory of the Shaper’s songs.

His eyes were heavy-lidded, minutely veined, wrinkled like an elderly mead-drinker’s.

My throat convulsed and I tried to get my breath to speak, but I couldn’t.

The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth as an ancient dog’s.

He remained that way, breathing hard with peevish anger.

“I know everything, you see,” the old voice wheedled.

You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.

He was testy all at once, as if answering an argument that had been put to him so often he was sick of it.

If you with your knowledge of present and past recall that a certain man slipped on, say, a banana peel, or fell off his chair, or drowned in a river, that recollection does not mean that you caused him to slip, or fall, or drown.

And even if, say, I interfere—burn up somebody’s meadhall, for instance, whether because I just feel like it or because some supplicant asked me to—even then I do not change the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning.

So much for free will and intercession!

They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts.

Simple facts in isolation, and facts to connect them—ands and buts—are the sine qua non of all their glorious achievement.

They have dim apprehensions that such propositions as ‘God does not exist’ are somewhat dubious at least in comparison with statements like ‘All carnivorous cows eat meat.’

That’s where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of reality—puts together all their facts with a gluey whine of connectedness. Mere tripe, believe me.

We (by which I mean you, not us) are apt to take modes of observable functioning in our own bodies as setting an absolute scale.

We can extend this progression indefinitely; there is no absolute standard of magnitude. Any term in this progression is large compared to its predecessor and small compared to its successor.

“It’s damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts familiar to a creature of the Dark Ages. Not that one age is darker than another. Technical jargon from another dark age.”

The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity.

And yet in its refusal, it passes toward novel order as a primary requisite for important experience.

We have to explain the aim at forms of order, and the aim at novelty of order, and the measure of success, and the measure of failure.

Limited to a finite individual occasion, importance ceases to be important. In some sense or other—we can skip the details—importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.

An angry man does not usually shake his fist at the universe in general. He makes a selection and knocks his neighbor down. A piece of rock, on the other hand, impartially attracts the universe according to the law of gravitation.

He stretched his wings—it was like a huge, irascible yawn—then settled again.

That’s the gist of it. In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms.

He shook his ponderous head.

I must have been an interesting sight, that instant, big shaggy monster intense and earnest, bent like a priest at his prayers.

If man’s the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him!

‘Know thyself,’ that’s my dictum. Know how much you’ve got, and beware of strangers!

In some way that I couldn’t explain, I knew that his scorn of my childish credulity was right.