Three Science Fiction Novellas by J. H. Rosny

Author:J. H. Rosny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

V.

The most difficult period of my life was that from twelve to eighteen years.

First of all, my parents tried to send me to high school; there I knew only misery and failures. As a result of exhausting efforts, I succeeded in expressing the most common things in an almost comprehensible manner: making a great effort to slow down my syllables, I blurted them out awkwardly, and with the stresses of a deaf person. But as soon as it was a matter of expressing something complex, my speech regained its fatal rapidity: no one was able to follow me.13 Thus, I was not able to make people aware of my progress orally. And my handwriting was atrocious, my letters overlapped each other, and in my impatience, I forgot syllables, words: it was monstrous gibberish. Besides, writing for me was a torture perhaps even more intolerable than speaking—it was so ponderous, so stiflingly slow!—If, sometimes, after great effort and the sweat of my brow, I managed to begin my homework, soon I was exhausted and out of patience, I felt myself fainting. I preferred therefore the reprimands of the teacher, my father’s bouts of fury, punishments, privations, scorn, to this horrible labor.

Thus, I was almost totally deprived of means of expressing myself: already an object of ridicule because of my thinness and my odd complexion, because of my strange eyes, even more I was seen as being some sort of idiot. It was necessary to take me out of school, to accept the fact that I must become a peasant. The day my father decided to give up all hope, he said to me with an unaccustomed gentleness:

“My poor lad, you see, I have done my duty . . . my entire duty! Never reproach me your fate!”

I was violently moved, I cried all the tears of my heart: never before had I felt with so much bitterness how isolated I was in the midst of mankind. I dared to kiss my father tenderly; I murmured:

“Yet it is not true that I am an imbecile!”

And in fact I felt superior to those who had been my peers. For some time now, my intelligence had been undergoing a remarkable development. I read, I understood, I intuited things, and I had, more than other men have, immense possibilities for meditation, within this universe that was visible to me alone.

My father was unable to untangle my words, but he was moved by my affection.

“Poor lad!” he said.

I looked at him; I felt a terrible despair, knowing all the more that the void that separated us would never be filled. My mother, through her loving intuition, realized at that moment that I was not inferior to other boys of my age: she stared at me tenderly, she spoke sweet words to me that came from the utmost depths of her being. Despite all that, I was condemned to cease my studies.

Because of my weak muscular strength, I was relegated to tending the flocks and livestock. I

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