"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

sound out. Finally, he gulped, clenched his fists and got a grip on himself.
"DoтАФdo you mean," he managed to croak at last, "that I'm famous? That
famous? "
"Famous? You, my dear sir, are beyond fame. You are one of the immortals the
human race has produced. As I put itтАФrather well if I may say soтАФin my last book,
Mathaway, the Man Who Shaped the Future: `How rarely has it fallen to the lot of
individual human endeavor toтАФ ' "
"That famous. " The blond beard worked the way a child 's face does when it's
about to cry. "That famous! "
"That famous! " Mr. Glescu assured him. "Who is the man with whom modern
painting, in its full glory, is said to have definitely begun? Who is the man whose
designs and special manipulations of color have dominated architecture for the past
five centuries, who is responsible for the arrangement of our cities, the shape of our
every artifact, the very texture of our clothing. "
"Me?" Morniel inquired weakly.
"You!" No other man in the history of art has exerted such a massive influence
over design or over so wide an area of art for so long a period of time. To whom
can I compare you, sir? To what other artist in history can I compare you? "
"Rembrandt? " Morniel suggested. He seemed to be trying to be helpful. "Da
Vinci?"
 Mr. Glescu sneered. "Rembrandt and Da Vinci in the same breath as you?
Ridiculous! They lacked your uni-versality, your taste for the cosmic, your sense of
the all-encompassing. No, to relate you properly to an equal, one must go outside
painting, to literature, possibly. Shakes-peare, with his vast breadth of understanding,
with the resounding organ notes of his poetry and with his tre-mendous influence on
the later English languageтАФbut even Shakespeare, I'm afraid, even ShakespeareтАФ"
He shook his head sadly.
"Wow! " breathed Morniel Mathaway.
"
Speaking of Shakespeare, " I broke in, "do you happen to know of a poet named
David Dantziger? Did much of his work survive?"
"Is that you?"
"Yes, " I told the man from 2487 A.D. eagerly. "That 's me, Dave Dantziger."
He wrinkled his forehead. "I don 't seem to remember any-What school of poetry
do you belong to? "
"Well, they call it by various names. Anti-imagist is the most usual one.
Anti-imagist or post-imagist."
"No, " said Mr. Glescu after thinking for a while. "The only poet I can remember for
this time and this part of the world is Peter Tedd. "
"Who is Peter Tedd? Never heard of him."
"Then this must he before he was discovered. But please remember, I am an art
scholar, not a literary one. It is entirely possible," he went on soothingly, "that were
you to mention your name to a specialist in the field of minor twentieth-century
versifiers, he could place you with a minimum of difficulty. Entirely possible."
I glanced at Morniel, and he was grinning at me from the bed. He had entirely
recovered by now and was beginning to soak the situation in through his pores. The
whole situation. His standing. Mine.
I decided I hated every single one of his guts.
Why did it have to be someone like Morniel Mathaway that got that kind of nod
from fate? There were so many painters who were decent human beings, and yet this