Faustus Read Free

me.
    FAUSTUS: Read the preamble. See. That Number. That all is reducible to periodicity To cipher, to a formula, expressed in number; and that number signifies not quantity … not quantity. But a progression. (
Pause
)
    FRIEND: … I am at a loss, my friend.
    FAUSTUS: No—stay—I shall parcel it slowly.
    FRIEND: Fit your description to my limits.
    FAUSTUS: Consider the boy.
    FRIEND: For which my felicitations.
    FAUSTUS: Many thanks. Now see him age.
    FRIEND: Which, may God in his beneficence permit.
    FAUSTUS: Amen, with all my heart. Now we admit him as a youth, surprised, by first love, later by betrothal, marriage, and conception. Each, to his eye, a personal, nay idiosyncratic ebullition. Yet, from our remove, inevitable, universal.
    FRIEND: Thus?
    FAUSTUS: And thus predictable. There is a generalized periodicity … Which, once revealed’s encountered everywhere. I instance: the recurrence of drought, famine, fire, and, by extension, those eruptions we, untutored, understand, as acts of will: war, civic growth, invention, and decay … Had one sufficient remove, one could plot the concordance.
    FRIEND: Of?
    FAUSTUS: Of acts of nature, and supposed acts of will. In short, of human movement. (
Pause
) There is a consonance.It is a code. It is called periodicity. It is the secret engine of the world.
    FRIEND: You here profess to comprehend it?
    FAUSTUS: Read. (
Pause
)
    FRIEND: Is it not blasphemy?
    FAUSTUS: Blasphemy and prayer are one. Both assert the existence of a superior power. The first, however, with conviction.
    FRIEND: But should one stray too far … ?
    FAUSTUS: How might one stray too far?
    FRIEND: Permit me, if I may, to counsel respect for the jocular proclivities we know to be the gods. Were it not better to refrain? Do not tempt fate.
    FAUSTUS: What is my charge but to tempt fate? Each time I commence and each conclude?
    FRIEND: Until?
    FAUSTUS: Until God recoil at the impertinence? (
Pause
) He bids the farmer find delight in the pristine, the entrepreneur in the ruined, the philosopher in the occluded. As sentries on the battlement, shall we not be drawn to the edge?
    FRIEND: And cautioned to refrain.
    FAUSTUS: Yet incited to leap.
    FRIEND: By?
    FAUSTUS: An echo of forgotten power, as in the life of birds.
    FRIEND: Do we descend from birds? Say angels.
    FAUSTUS: Both, you remark, can fly.
    FRIEND: You frighten me.
    FAUSTUS: Is it not my duty? Hand me the journal—I will respond to them.
    FRIEND: Would I were more intelligent, or to dispute or second your conclusions.
    FAUSTUS: Each trade must bear its occupation mark. The ploughman’s gnarled hands, the blacksmith’s seared forearm.
    FRIEND: And the philosopher?
    FAUSTUS: A certain melancholy—the dual conviction of futility and prescience. A cook with but two spices, ever attempting to amend with one, his error withthe other. (
Pause
) Enough. I have transgressed, not the prerogatives of the gods, but the more comprehensible strictures of good manners. Today’s the boy’s.
    FRIEND: Indeed.
    FAUSTUS: He wrote to me.
    FRIEND: He did?
    FAUSTUS: A poem. ( FAUSTUS
hands the poem to his
FRIEND .)
    (
The
FRIEND
reads the poem
)
    FRIEND: “What mystic light illumes the night. A father’s care …” This is a sign of grace.
    FAUSTUS: Is that a scientific term?
    FRIEND: Never a cynic but concealed acolyte
in potentia
.
    FAUSTUS: And what brave man divulged the theory?
    FRIEND: You did.
    FAUSTUS: Your learning does you credit. “A father’s care.” Perhaps it is grace.
    FRIEND: What a concession.
    FAUSTUS: Yes, why should I be chosen?
    FRIEND: All are chosen.
    FAUSTUS: All are chosen? Then what possible meaning has the term?
    FRIEND: We are all subject to God’s grace.
    FAUSTUS: Bless me, he treads damn near the theological.
    FRIEND: You say you seek a greater power.
    FAUSTUS: A greater power than
that
, certainly.
    FRIEND: Than what?
    FAUSTUS: Than
religion
.
    FRIEND: There is no greater power.
    FAUSTUS: Then why does one find, under its aegis,