Sketch: Snow and Tusk

At the same dinner reception I happened on a professional speaker, a man who had gained a certain amount of notoriety and amassed a comfortable fortune applying the philosophy of becoming to the world of advanced technology. In fact the reception was held in part in his honor. By the time he and his assistant arrived we well into our cordials, and as he removed his coat he let it be known he was through with his speaking engagements. He then joined us for a cordial of his own. Of course, his revelation had left us all with pause, and so finally he explained that after doing this for several years, the speaker had realized that it was impossible to separate himself from the speech, the speech that he had given over the course of several hundred engagements, that instead of the constantly shifting becoming that was its theme, he felt the speech cast in tones more rote, and that he had started to resemble his speech, that same roteness, if that's at all possible. I’d found, said the speaker, that if it were so easy to rest on static through simple consistency, then that put his entire thesis under question, the speaker added. The reception drew quiet from that point, in fact the only sound was the undulating of the sherry in the slowly draining glasses, until one of the guests had asked him what the speaker had been doing since then. A study of white, the speaker said. He exclaimed that for all the colors, the range of variations grows smaller and more entrenched until you only have black, a single color form for which the eye only picks up one shade. He intended to look at it from the other side, to look at the shade that had inspired the snow, stained the tusk and created the Death, the destroyer of all worlds, and for what it was also worth the color that, regardless of whether it hued a more pink or yellow or a puce-like green, the eye and mind, the sense-making apparatus as it were, was always resolving it back to the same shade, that of white. The speaker had not re-entered my thoughts until about a week ago, when I saw his obituary in the Times and its mention, in passing, that for the last twenty years he had been fighting an macular degeneration, and in fact by the time he died was completely blind.