The Salad Days

By Peter Szulc

There are rules to rock soccer. It’s a very specific game and it’s not meant to be played in a half-assed fashion. Professor Carlyle played the game the way he liked to live his life: with extreme deliberation. He had invented rock soccer, and he felt obliged to scrupulously follow every rule he devised. There was something quietly spectacular about rocks in Carlyle’s mind; they existed out of sheer force of habit. The world had always needed rocks but it was a boring, thankless job: this responsibility of merely Being, a job that rocks shouldered without any complaints.

On Wednesday the professor had a fantastic game of rock soccer. The walk from his office in Lewis to his lecture in Prince was long and uphill, yet the whole way he managed to kick a rock in front of him with each step. He never once had to use his hands to align the rock with his path; his feet always coaxed it back to the cobbled path when it spat off into the grass, reuniting two long-separated stones. Not using hands was one of his rules that he obeyed without question or rationale.

A graduate student had encountered Professor Carlyle playing rock soccer as he crossed the quad a windy day last April. The Professor was engaged single-mindedly in attempting to pry his rock forth from where it had fallen in the mild crevasse between path and grass. When asked what he was doing, Professor Carlyle muttered something about conducting a thought experiment. The graduate student, curiosity aroused by the prospect of some earth-shattering revelation on the nature of mind and reality, asked him to elaborate.

Professor Carlyle made him wait a full minute until he flipped the rock loose with his toe and gently nudged it onto the bricks. He informed the grad student quite calmly that it was an experiment in perception and talking to anyone else about it defeated the purpose. With that he slipped back into his silent communion with the rock and could not be aroused for further comment.

Rock soccer filled him with a sense of his own power at having shrunk his world down to a sphere six feet across; a sphere made up of only him and this anonymous rock that he never saw again once the game was completed.  On Wednesday, however, he felt a special fondness for the stone by the time he reached Prince. At the door he spontaneously violated one of his own rules, picking it up and pocketing it.

The lecture hall within Prince shone with the silence of a frozen lake. A brittle layer of minutes was all that separated it from the riotous human commotion that lingers beneath all public places. In the emptiness Professor Carlyle found the steel struts supporting the roof oddly reminiscent of giant ribs as he descended to his small round stage. He spread his papers across the desk. Perhaps a student would say something to give him pause today but he doubted it; better to be well-armed against silence. Maybe he could use the classroom’s phone to call his wife? There was probably some arcane regulation forbidding it, but he simply didn’t feel well. Was that so selfish? Prince Hall was an eerie place. Sometimes it felt like a living thing in its inhuman disinterest.

As the Professor prepared his notes he felt as if a shadow had fallen across the room. Glancing up, he realized that it was the students, silently arrayed in their seats, notebooks open. They had drifted across the hall like smoke, solidifying without him even noticing. How their sudden arrival continually surprised him was a total mystery. Disconcerted by their gaze he swallowed thickly and began the lesson, keeping the desk between himself and the class. Teaching Philosophical Logic, he rationalized as he wrote, requires one to keep the world at arm’s length.

Professor Carlyle felt a warm familiarity with the contours of his lesson: P→Q, iff, ∀x, the parade of usual suspects marched across the board. He intimately knew the order of each letter in this strange alphabet. He wrote with his back to the students, sheltering each proposition with his shadow until he felt it sufficiently strong enough to venture forth on its own. And for what end? He knew the eyes behind him must be dully pounding apart the delicate cathedral of logic he constructed, with a detached vigor that bordered on malice.

He was using mere symbols and letters to represent universal truths that no amount of words, tarnished with their immaturity, their emotion, could ever convey. For centuries the universe had been something too big, something to fear, and here he was now, tracing it onto the blackboard! Growing upset, he leaned forward onto his chalk to make a particularly bold point. It vaporized into a dusty cloud and he whirled about, gripped by a sudden rage. He was more than a board and chalk or a dusty lecture hall that gorged on students and regurgitated them three times a week. He didn’t start at ten o’clock and vanish by the hour’s end.

He couldn’t find a kindred spirit in the student’s dead eyes and he moved over them in an instant, drifting up to the ceiling as he spoke desperately: “Listen. Does anyone understand what I’ve been saying? At all?” The vaulted ceiling was surprisingly unresponsive. Some ghostly mass beneath it twitched, yet he ignored it and its anemic rumble, a trick he had learned early on in his career.

“Did you hear me? This isn’t just a bunch of nonsense. It’s important, what I’ve written here. It’s the only tool you have to tell how the world works. It is the world! The world is logic, the world is a set of truths. If you don’t grasp that, if you don’t even care about that, you’re worse than blind. You may as well not even exist.” Breathing heavily he leans heavily on the board, smearing the chalky universe on his open palm. Only then does he look down. He expects the worst: the students snickering at his petty flare of emotion, others shouldering their backpacks and ambling off to leave him alone, speared by the fluorescent lights onstage. They are instead hunched over their desks, pens hurriedly scribbling into their notebooks. He should have known this was too much for them yet he rages on recklessly:

“Don’t copy what I’m saying! These propositions on the board are what you should be writing. They’re all we have to describe reality in the end. That’s all that matters. Do you think you can trust your emotions? Your intellect? Your perception? Logic is the only constant force in all the tiny worlds we make every instant of our lives!”

Professor Carlyle’s vision slumps in on itself as the scribbling continues. The silence from the board at his back is more deafening than ever before. The students melt into fog as he stares dully at the clock on the far wall, saying: “You can leave now.”

The great shuffle begins as they depart, minds surely beyond the confines of Prince Hall, the keys to the world shoved in their notebooks and vanishing into their cavernous backpacks. Slipping away until Friday when they will be brightly illuminated again, for exactly fifty minutes and fifty minutes only. So too for him, Professor Caryle muses.

As the students leave, he says nothing to them; he doesn’t know their names. He instead withdraws the rock from his pocket and caresses it, feeling a new sense of companionship with it as he mutters, “I understand. I understand us now. The simple burden of Being isn’t day in day out. It’s worse. You only feel it when you’re being kicked.”