Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [128]
He scored this out and wrote:
The universe compels cooperation. To cooperate consciously is freedom, unconsciously is….
Nature always has our assistance. To assist eagerly is freedom, resist-ingly is….
God needs our help. Giving it joyfully is freedom, resentfully is…. We have God’s help. To know this is freedom, not to notice is…. He snarled and threw the notebook at the ceiling where it rebounded onto the top of the wardrobe, dislodging an avalanche of books and papers. He lay feeling happy about the changes in life, then masturbated and fell asleep. His happiness had gone when he awoke.
McAlpin was not at school that day. At tea break Judy, Molly Tierney and Rushford discussed the costumes they would wear at the fancy-dress dance. Thaw was unsure how to behave. He drew on the tabletop and grinned with the left side of his mouth.
“You should see my costume!” said Molly gleefully. “It’s terrible. All pink and nineteen-twentyish, with a cigarette holder three feet long. Here, give me a pencil.”
She seized the pencil from Thaw’s fingers and drew the costume on the tabletop. That evening he went into town to meet June and stood in an entry to a clothes shop looking at suave dummies in evening dress and sportswear. Grey dusk became black night. The entrance was a common place for appointments, and he often had the company of people waiting for boy or girlfriends. None waited longer than fifteen minutes. When it was not possible to pretend June would come he walked home feeling horribly insulted.
McAlpin entered the classroom briskly next day with a new book in one hand. He hooked his neatly rolled umbrella on a radiator, laid his coat and bag on a pedestal and came briskly to Thaw. He said, “Listen to this!” and read out the first paragraph of Oblomov.
Thaw heard him with embarrassment then said, “Very good” and went into a corner to sharpen a pencil. That morning he and McAlpin worked apart from each other. At lunchtime Thaw went to the main building and obtained an interview with the registrar. In a careful voice he said he thought the school’s anatomy course inadequate, that he was going to ask permission to sketch in the dissection room of the university, that he would be grateful for a letter from the registrar saying that such permission would be useful to his art. The registrar swung reflectively from side to side in his swivel chair. He said, “Well, I’m not sure, Thaw. Morbid anatomy certainly was in our curriculum till shortly after the fourteen-eighteen war. I was trained in it myself. I don’t think I benefitted from it, but of course I was not so dedicated an artist as you. But would such training do you good psychologically? I honestly think it would do harm.” “I am not—” Thaw said, then cleared his throat and knelt before the electric fire near Mr. Peel’s desk. He stared into the red-hot coil and plucked fibres out of the coconut matting. “I am not a complete person. A good painter one day, mibby, but always an inadequate man. So my work is important to me. If that work is to develop I must see how people are made.” “Your ’Last Supper’ showed a detailed grasp of anatomy, gained, I assume, by the usual methods?”
“Yah. That detail was bluff. I padded out the definite things I knew with imagination and pictures in books. But now my imagination needs more detailed knowledge to work on.”
“I am not convinced that morbid anatomy will be good for you, Thaw, but I suppose you must convince yourself of that. I’m remotely acquainted with the head of the university medical faculty. I’ll get in touch with him.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Thaw, standing up. “Some sketching in the vivisection room is really necessary at this stage.”
“Dissection room.”
“Pardon?”
“You said vivisection room.”
“Did I? I’m sorry,” said Thaw, confused.
He ran back to the classroom to work off his exhiliration. McAlpin stood at an easel near