The Thin Man

Years afterward, those who had seen Mister Jones enter the room (if indeed there had been any who had seen him enter, since every witness, questioned separately, would insist that he had somehow always already been there, standing with that absurd little pencil pinched between fingers trained by education to believe that every spectacle, no matter how grotesque, would eventually yield itself to notation and therefore to comprehension) would continue, each according to his own vanity and deficiencies of recollection, to dispute not what occurred — for there was little agreement even that occurrence itself possesses an independent existence — but whether Mister Jones, at the instant he crossed the threshold, had already carried within himself the challenge of being, in potentia, the very catastrophe that would afterward seem merely to unfold according to laws older than memory, or whether the room itself, by some ancient appetite known only to places where certainty goes to die, had selected him from among all possible men in this seemingly best of all possible worlds.

It was not merely that he observed a naked man and demanded to know his identity, though that question, so innocent in its grammar and yet so swollen with the invisible presumption that every visible object exists principally in anticipation of being named by the properly credentialed observer, echoed through the place with the faint comic pathos of a pastor asking directions to heaven from the congregation he has only just begun to suspect has never believed him; it was rather that no answer ever reached him without first passing through so many mouths, each adding to it not information but sediment, that by the time the words arrived they bore no more resemblance to explanation than a river in flood bears to the mountain spring from which it imagines itself descended.

Someone, perhaps in jest and perhaps in accusation, pointed toward Mister Jones himself, another, hearing only the gesture and not the question, claimed ownership of something no one had yet identified, another demanded the whereabouts of whatever it was whose existence had become indisputable solely because everyone seemed already to have misplaced it, and Mister Jones, a putative expert on the Jazz Age and Lost Generation musings of one F. Scott Fitzgerald who had reportedly spent the better portion of his life among professors whose syllabi arranged chaos into semesters (and here we are speaking of Mister Jones, Fitzgerald having drunk himself to death decades before, believing himself a piteous failure), barristers whose arguments could conceivably persuade 12 strangers that ambiguity had always possessed a single legal meaning, benefactors who transformed moral uncertainty into deductible generosity, and respectable men whose confidence in facts increased in exact proportion to their distance from them, found himself standing at the centre of a conversation in which every sentence appeared simultaneously to answer, contradict, and erase the last until language itself seemed less an instrument of communication than the debris left floating after some forgotten collapse of contemporary Weltanschauung.

One imagines — for certainty has by now become not merely impossible but positively vulgar — that he attempted to reassure himself by remembering those previous associations, those cultivated acquaintances whose occupations had always promised solidity: the foresters and surveyors, men who could persuade forests to become acreage and trees to become columns of figures in those halcyon times before the annual spring and summer rampages of feral, uncontrollable wildfires; the scholars who had taught him that every civilization, once sufficiently annotated, surrendered its secret anatomy; the novels by that celebrated midwesterner whose pages had persuaded him that complexity itself, provided one read attentively enough, would ultimately arrange itself into moral proportion; and yet what use was all that accumulated literacy now, confronted not with ignorance, which books may diminish, but with all this aleatory mise en scène in which every explanation merely generated further explanations until meaning, breeding without restraint, devoured itself?

Thus when the performer abandoned whatever exhibition had first attracted the crowd and approached Mister Jones directly — not with hostility, which at least acknowledges common ground, but with the courteous curiosity reserved for phenomena that might never recur — and asked him what sensation accompanied so extraordinary a condition as his own, extending afterward into his hands a bleached fragment of bone with all the grave ceremony of one returning a family inheritance preserved through generations, Mister Jones could discover no refuge except to pronounce the event impossible, not realizing, poor man, that impossibility had ceased to function there as an objection and had become instead the ordinary climate in which all present conducted their affairs.

Nor did the room, having once discovered the peculiar elasticity of his incomprehension, release him from its patient education, for there appeared another figure who, after ceremonies at once devotional and theatrical whose significance remained forever suspended between sacrament and mockery, solemnly restored to Mister Jones the use of his own throat, thanking him for the loan as though identity itself consisted merely of bodily organs temporarily entrusted to strangers; and afterward there emerged a one-eyed herald proclaiming with prophetic urgency that the decisive instant had arrived, though every inquiry Mister Jones ventured concerning its purpose or destination dissolved immediately into fresh interrogations until cause and effect, question and answer, speaker and listener revolved around one another like exhausted planets unable either to collide or escape, ending only when the little prophet, in a voice burdened less by anger than by infinite disappointment, condemned Mister Jones as some cumbersome domestic beast expected to nourish a world from which he remained hopelessly estranged.

The consensus in the room was that this, more than any isolated absurdity, constituted the true revelation — not the naked man, nor the bone, nor the impossible restoration of a throat never knowingly surrendered, nor even the transformation by which Mister Jones seemed gradually to acquire the stooped and burdened posture of a creature bred not for understanding but for endurance, carrying invisible freight across immeasurable deserts — but rather the slow and irreversible discovery that there exist communities into which education may enter only as another form of blindness, where every credential, every cultivated certainty, every polished accomplishment serves merely to delay that final humiliating recognition toward which all the others, whether fools or prophets or mountebanks, had been quietly labouring from the moment he crossed the threshold: that history, identity, even the self which imagines it is observing the world from some inviolate centre of reason, pace Leibniz, are not possessions one secures through knowledge but unstable fictions forever being narrated by voices whose authority derives precisely from the impossibility of deciding which of them, if any, has ever told the truth. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.