"Walter Jon Williams - No Spot of Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

His spirits raised by the banter with his darky, Poe limped to his headquarters tent, marked by the
division flags and the two ravens on their perch, and let Sextus serve him his evening meal. The ravens
gobbled to each other while Poe ate sparingly, and drank two glasses of the soft cider. Poe hadn't
touched spirits in fifteen years, even though whiskey was a lot easier to find in this army than water.

Not since that last sick, unholy carouse in Baltimore.

Where were his orders? he wondered. He'd just been ordered to occupy Ewell's trenches. Where was the
rest of the army? Where was Lee? No one had told him anything.

After the meal, he'd send couriers to find Lee. Somebody had to know something

It was impossible they'd forgotten him.

****

Eureka, he called it. His prose poem had defined the universe, explained it all, a consummate theory of
matter, energy, gravity, art, mathematics, the mind of God. The universe was expanding, he wrote, had
exploded from a single particle in a spray of evolving atoms that moved outward at the speed of divine
thought. The universe was still expanding, the forms of its matter growing ever more complex; but the
expansion would slow, reverse; matter would coalesce, return to its primordial simplicity; the Divine
Soul that resided in every atom would reunite in perfect self-knowledge.

It was the duty of art, he thought, to reunite human thought with that of the Divine, particled with
unparticled matter. In his poetry he had striven for an aesthetic purity of thought and sentiment, a
detachment from political, moral, and temporal affairs"┬ж Nothing of Earth shone in his verse, nothing
contaminated by matter--he desired harmonies, essences, a striving for Platonic perfection, for the
dialogue of one abstract with another. Beyond the fact that he wrote in English, nothing connected the

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 No Spot of Ground


poems with America, the nineteenth century, its life, its movements. He disdained even standard
versification--he wrote with unusual scansions, strange metrics--the harmonies of octameter catalectic,
being more rarified, seemed to rise to the lofty ear of God more than could humble iambic pentameter,
that endless trudge, trudge, trudge across the surface of the terrestrial globe. He wanted nothing to stand
between himself and supernal beauty, nothing to prevent the connection of his own mind with that of
God.

He had poured everything into Eureka, all his soul, his hope, his grief over Virginia, his energy. In the
end there was the book, but nothing left of the man. He lectured across America, the audiences polite
and appreciative, their minds perhaps touched by his own vision of the Divine--but all his own divinity
had gone into the book, and in the end Earth reached up to claim him. Entire weeks were spent in
delirium, reeling drunk from town to town, audience to audience, woman to woman"┬ж

Ending at last in some Baltimore street, lying across a gutter, his body a dam for a river of half-frozen
October sleet.

****