"It's been a strange life"

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen's son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom.  "Well, what's it going to be," the small man asked, "or is it going to be nothing?"


"I don't know," Forlesen said.  He was looking at the weave of the small man's suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos.  "I wish I could talk to my wife."


"Your wife is dead," the small man said "The kid didn't want to tell you.  We got her laid out in the next room.  What'll it be?  Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?"


"I don't know," Forlesen said again.  "I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed - and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free.  And yet ... it's been a strange life."


"You may have been oppressed by demons," the small man said.  "Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century.  Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain."


"Those are the explanations?" Forlesen asked.


"Those are some of them."


"I want to know if it's meant anything," Forlesen said.  "If what I suffered - if it's been worth it."


"No," the little man said.  "Yes.  No.  Yes.  Yes.  No.  Yes.  Yes.  Maybe."


Today I finished reading "Forlesen", a short story by Gene Wolfe, which I read in his collection: The Best of Gene Wolfe

It's a heartbreaking story about the modern working man.  As in most works by Gene Wolfe, identity is a mixed up, irresolute concept: easily interchangeable and in flux.  

A man wakes up in his house knowing absolutely nothing about himself or how to live life.  Everything he learns is from pamphlets left for him in his house, and from his wife (who also has woken up knowing nothing).

He is instructed to go to his job in a management and supervisory position at Model Pattern Products, a company that does not seem to do anything of significance, and where the positions of every worker seem to flip flop regularly.  It is a workplace where you find yourself in meetings discussing non-sensical concepts, and where you are plopped down at your desk with a list of incredibly vague responsibilities, and told to make yourself useful.

It is sadly far too similar to how the working life these days actually is like.

It ends with the paragraphs I posted at the start of the entry.

In Gene Wolfe's afterward on the story, he writes:

There are men - I have known a good many - who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company.  They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place.  Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them.  They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do.  And, failing that, just try to look busy.


In time their lives end, as all lives do.  As this world recons things they have spent eight thousand days, perhaps, at work; but in a clearer air it has all been the same day.


The story you have just read was my tribute to them.


Chilling.

I wonder which of his stories I will read next.  I definitely still need to read "The Death of Doctor Island", but that is a longer novella.  I might want to read his shorter stuff first.

It is impossible for me to overstate how much Gene Wolfe's writing means to me, and how much it has affected my life.  I seriously recommend giving his work a try.  It can be intimidating yes, because he requires every ounce of your concentration, and his books usually demand second or third readings before the finer details and mysteries become apparent.  But once you read the beauty of his writing, it is impossible to go back.

He is the greatest writer alive today, bar none, and you have never heard of him.  And that's not just my opinion.  Neil Gaiman agrees, as does Michael Swanwick, Patrick O'Leary, and many others who know what they are talking about far better than me.