The Name of the World Read Free

the School of Social Sciences, from a dozen to as many as a hundred boys and girls glided around a pond with a tiny unscalable island in its center, a monolithic, rock island with a sculpture on its peak—red sheet-metal shapes—the pond marked off by a railing. Everybody skated around it in one direction. “Pond” may not be the right word. People told me it wasn’t eight inches deep. A reflecting pool, I’d guess; about twice the area of a football field. There were always a few wobbly beginners clinging to the rail, but for the most part these young students sat on the pond’s stone lip while they got on their skates, then stood up to take one long, expert stride onto an invisible carousel. It didn’t look like exercise. No rabbit eluded them. They went in an endless loop, but they weren’t after anything.
    I often ate lunch in a cafeteria in the basement of the School of Law and then walked beside a bike path around the Middle Campus, stopping to watch the skaters until the chill forced me to start walking again, down past the pond and the Science Quad and over to the Museum of Art. And that’s what I happened to do on February 20, the fourth anniversary of the accident that took my family. I watched the skaters, and then went to see Bill, the man with whom I was so sociable, as I’ve mentioned, in fantasy.
    The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.
    That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who’d spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill—an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train—to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you—looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I.
    This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work’s owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family’s old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I’ve said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.
    To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we’ll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church’s grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of