He let me in an returned straight to his needy couch,
teetering on the end ofhis spine in a double triangle as he drew
up his knees to replace his feet under cover. I was overcome by
a rush of nervous sublimity carried by the air.

"If this is madness," I reflected, breathing his at-
mosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, "madness is something
very beautiful."

My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value re-
turned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity
of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his
presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it.
Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness,
but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern
among the unified flood of customary light and infiltration of
rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer
than the gossamer halo round the street lamp in fog. A white
candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing
shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably
acute.

I was not unfamiliar with it. That different light I had
seen etherealize the heavy features of Signora Machiabene an hour
before she was stricken to death. That very essence of light I
had begun to perceive during the prolonged moment when a dislocated
vertebra had thrown me beyond the circumscription of bodily life.

There is no saying in what bliss consists, yet I could
see it incorporated with Insel's face, bathed in that different
light, as he lay under his unique blanket, his limping hands clasped
behind his head.

"I see through the wall," he said, his voice at peace.
"I can lie here hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear
little lives. Sometimes they play a gramophone and on its way to
me the music becomes miraculous."

"You have never known ennui," I laughed, forgetting as
completely as he evidently had, if indeed he had ever been con-
scious of, the tortured glow-worm of the Boulevard night, the
inarticulate confidences of one cut off from mankind; the sleepless
seeker after an unmentionable salvation who, blinded by his own
unnatural glitter, was so wounded by the dawn; that distracted

D-3

man who, terrified of isolation, hung onto my hand while he flopped
and darted like a fish on the end of a line, stung by a mystifying
despair.

"Never," he assented, beatified, "I am eternally content.
My happiness is infinite. All the desires of the earth are con-
summed within myself."

"Aside from that-- What are the people in the next room
doing?"

"Just being-- I ask no more of any one. Being in itself
is sufficient for us all," he answered enraptured.

Seeing I had taken up one of his drawings, he instantly
arose. Always-- there was something of the depths of the sea about
him and his work, also of eventual evolution as in the drawing I
was looking at where to a rock of lava a pale subaqueous weed clung
in the process of becoming a small limp hand. The tips of its
fingers were stealing into pink.

Insert - all my future work -?

Insel himself had fearsome hands, narrow, and pallid like
his face, with a hard, square ossification towards the base of the
back, and then so tapering as if compressed in driving an instrument
against some great resistance.

"You were a lithographer, not an engraver?" I had once asked him, puzzled by what his hands looked as if they must have been in the habit of doing, and we concluded this conformaturi could be an inheritance from the schlosser's driving power. But out of this atavistic base his fingers grew into the new sensibility of a younger generation, in his case excessive; his fingers clung together like a kind of pulpoid antennae, seemingly inert in their superfine sensibility, being aquiver with such minuscule vibrations they scarcely needed to move.-- fingers almost alarmingly fresh and pink for extremities of that bloodless carcass, the idle digits of some pampered daughter and their fresh tips huddled together in collective instinct to more and more microscopically focus his infinitesimal touch. All the same, there was something unpleasantly embryonic about them. I had never seen anything that gave this impression of the cruel difficulty of coming apart since, in my babyhood, I had watched the freak in Barnum's circus unjoin the ominous limpness of the legs of his undeveloped twin.

"Let's have a look at your feet," I said as he came weightlessly towards me. He drew off his slippers, padding over

D-5

the bare boards on the drained Gothic feet of a dying ivory Christ.

"What's this?" I teased, pointing to a lurid patch on
his instep, "a chancre?"

"No, it's only where my shoe rubs me. I bought new shoes
when I sold that picture and they hurt me," he explained, frowning
helplessly.

"Why not try pouring water into them and wearing them
till they 'adapt'? It often works."

A strange bruise. It shone with the eerieazure of a
neon light. But once within range of Insel, nothing seemed unaccount-
able, as though he submitted to an unknown law enforcing itself
through him. Each item of his furnishing, he having touched it, had
undergone the precious transformation of the packet he had folded
in my home. His hand, in passing over them, must have caused
their simple structure to obtrude upon the sight in advance of
their banal identity.

A row of powdered-soap carton, set upon a shelf, he had
stood up to the significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive
uniforms consisting in the sufficiency of their sheer sides. He
showed me they were empty. Altogether, his place had an uncommon

to evolve from his elemental mists, the creeping to maturity of
the almost invisible herbage left from under the withdrawn tide of
his hovering waves.)

His fame was to be fabulous, his wealth extravagant--
so that at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive
cruelty for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly
incorporeal he grew in his grand exaltation, my daughter's photograph.

"That will be really nice," I responded genially. "As
I come to think of it a son-in-law--"

"Exactly," he burst out wildly. "You and I, we could have
such a wonderful time together."

"--- a son-in-law with rays---" I brought up short-- "and
what would my daughter be doing?" then hurriedly, thinking to
profit him by the occasion, I urged "You must _paint those pictures_--
otherwise you will grow to be too old to marry her."

"Ah, well," he waived, with that sudden doleful look he
had of gazing into an abyss when confronted with whatever imperative
of whatever consummation. "No matter. It would suffice me just
to know her, to have the joy of _watching_ her evolution. It would
be a very wonderful thing indeed to take part in the Entwicklung

The first stage of Insel's intimacy completed, when he evidently intended to let you further 'in on' his show, he insisted on your reading Kafka, just as on assisting at a foreign Opera one is handed a Book of the Words.

"Study this well," he tacitly commended, "It will give you the angle of approach. In Kafka," he explained, "I found a foreshadowing of my hounded existence, recognized the relentless drive of my peculiar misfortune."

'Der Prozess' was the volume he borrowed to lend me, and I lay awake reading on and on and on, curious for the book to begin, when, with one eye still open, I came upon the end to fall asleep in the unsatisfied certainty of having <ins>become acquainted</ins> with an undeniable, yet perhaps the most useless, genius who ever lived.