Mr. Raven follows through on the promise made at the end of Chapter IV: he conducts Mr. Vane home to his own cottage, and introduces him to his wife. The journey itself is fascinating. It spans the course of all four seasons in one day, and contains what to me is the most striking science fiction aspect of the story: Mr. Raven appears to give an account of the phenomenon of time dilation at high velocities. (Lilith was published ten years before Einstein published the special theory of relativity.) Upon arrival at the cottage, Mr. Vane is given the invitation to sleep in their house, with the implied expectation that he should accept it. The catch is that neither Mr. Vane nor his hosts will be able to control when he wakes. He has even greater cause for uneasiness. The sleep that Mr. Raven and his wife are referring to is clearly a form of death. Mr. Raven has already revealed that his occupation is as a sexton, and that he watches over a vast churchyard, waiting for the resurrection of those laid to rest there.
As a side note, the multidimensional identity of Mr. Raven seems to mirror the multidimensionality of the world he inhabits, and Mr. Vane is still in the process of sorting it out when they arrive at the cottage. He frequently shifts between bird and human shape, and is simultaneously Mr. Vane’s great-great-grandfather’s librarian, the sexton of a vast cemetery, and, as it will appear, the biblical character Adam, the first man. In reconciliation of some of these apparently disparate roles, Mr. Raven remarks that the professions of a librarian and a sexton are essentially the same: both watch over dead forms that have the potential to come to life again. In his profession, Mr. Raven appears, in Wendell Berry’s fine phrase, to “practice resurrection.” Early on in the story, while in raven shape, he throws a worm into the air, upon which it turns into a butterfly. Vane objects that butterflies come from caterpillars, not earthworms, but Mr. Raven remains unconcerned. Later, he connects this specifically to his calling as a sexton:
“What made you think me a bird?”
“You looked a raven, and I saw you dig worms out of the earth with your beak.”
“And then?”
“Toss them in the air.” “And then?”
“They grew butterflies, and flew away.”
“Did you ever see a raven do that? I told you I was a sexton!”
“Does a sexton toss worms in the air, and turn them into butterflies?”
“Yes.”
“I never saw one do it!”
“You saw me do it!” (Chapter VI, “The Sexton’s Cottage”)
As regards their human charges, the sleepers in their house, the primary activity of Adam and Eve seems to reside in watchfulness. We get the sense, however, that in doing this they are active participants in the great drama of resurrection.
What Mr. Raven and his wife invite Mr. Vane to is actually death, and at the same time it is actually sleep. The Christian transformation of death into sleep has been so thoroughly carried out here that death has taken on the physical characteristics of sleep. In the pure atmosphere of Adam and Eve’s vault, the sleepers’ bodies do not decay, but in fact are gradually healed of the ravages of time. Those who are ready to sleep must lie down on their stone couches of their own accord, although they may receive help in this. Still, there is the notion that no one can sleep until their “time has come”, and until they are in a way spiritually prepared for it. Indeed, even as Mr. Raven extends the invitation to Mr. Vane, he fears that he is not ready for it:
“Here is Mr. Vane, wife!” said the raven.
“He is welcome,” she answered, in a low, rich, gentle voice. Treasures of immortal sound seemed to be buried in it.
I gazed, and could not speak.
“I knew you would be glad to see him!” added the raven.
She stood in front of the door by which she had entered, and did not come nearer.
“Will he sleep?” she asked.
“I fear not,” he replied; “he is neither weary nor heavy laden.”
“Why then have you brought him?”
“I have my fears it may prove precipitate.” (Chapter VI, “The Sexton’s Cottage”)
Mr. Raven is not omniscient, but he is farsighted. We may feel that the question, “Why then have you brought him?” has not been satisfactorily answered. If Mr. Raven fears that Vane is not ready, and if Vane’s refusal to sleep is going to have disastrous consequences, then why bring him?
I think we can compare this to Jesus’ calling of the rich young man in Matthew 19, the subject of MacDonald’s sermon “The Way”. In fact, I believe that the parallels are strikingly exact:
“The youth had got on so far, was so pleasing in the eyes of the Master, that he would show him the highest favour he could; he would take him to be with him—to walk with him, and rest with him, and go from him only to do for him what he did for his Father in heaven—to plead with men, he a mediator between God and men. He would set him free at once, a child of the kingdom, an heir of the life eternal….
He could have taken his possessions from him by an exercise of his own will, but there would have been little good in that; he wished to do it by the exercise of the young man’s will: that would be a victory indeed for both! So would he enter into freedom and life, delivered from the bondage of mammon by the lovely will of the Lord in him, one with his own. By the putting forth of the divine energy in him, he would escape the corruption that is in the world through lust—that is, the desire or pleasure of having.
The young man would not.
Was the Lord then premature in his demand on the youth? Was he not ready for it? Was it meant for a test, and not as an actual word of deliverance? Did he show the child a next step on the stair too high for him to set his foot upon? I do not believe it. He gave him the very next lesson in the divine education for which he was ready. It was possible for him to respond, to give birth, by obedience, to the redeemed and redeeming will, and so be free. It was time the demand should be made upon him. Do you say, ‘But he would not respond, he would not obey!’? Then it was time, I answer, that he should refuse, that he should know what manner of spirit he was of, and meet the confusions of soul, the sad searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must obey, or make such refusal—and know it.”
We could take every sentence of this passage in direct application to the drama unfolding in Lilith. Mr. Raven is not unfairly setting up Mr. Vane for failure. The demand is not premature. If Vane is going to refuse the offer of rest, it is time for him to do it, and be exposed to the “sad searchings of heart” that do indeed follow. There is, however, an essential condition required for actual fairness here: it is that the failure not be final. Here is how MacDonald expresses it in “The Way”:
“Shall I then be supposed to mean that the refusal of the young man was of necessity final? that he was therefore lost? that because he declined to enter into life the door of life was closed against him? Verily, I have not so learned Christ. And that the lesson was not lost, I see in this, that he went away sorrowful. Was such sorrow, in the mind of an earnest youth, likely to grow less or to grow more? …Perhaps this youth was never one of the Lord’s so long as he was on the earth, but perhaps when he saw that the Master himself cared nothing for the wealth he had told him to cast away, that, instead of ascending the throne of his fathers, he let the people do with him what they would, and left the world the poor man he had lived in it, by its meanest door, perhaps then he became one of those who sold all they had, and came and laid the money at the apostles’ feet.”
In Lilith, it is quite literally Sorrow, personified as Lady Marah (“bitterness”), the daughter of Adam and Eve, that ultimately brings Mr. Vane back for his third, and finally fruitful, opportunity to sleep in their house. The parallel between Mr. Vane and the rich young man is brought out even more by Mr. Raven’s reply to his wife’s first question: “I fear not,” he replied; “he is neither weary nor heavy laden.” This is a clear reference to Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The invitation to rest that Mr. Vane receives is the same that the rich young man receives in MacDonald’s envisioning of the gospel story in “The Way”: “[H]e would show him the highest favour he could; he would take him to be with him—to walk with him, and rest with him….”
In his brilliant sermon “The Yoke of Jesus” in The Hope of the Gospel, MacDonald asserts that the invitation of Matthew 11 is Jesus’ own form of his gospel. The invitation to be with him, to work in union with him, to share his rest–this is the good news according to Jesus himself. This was the invitation that the twelve disciples accepted; this was the invitation that the rich young man declined. It is also the invitation that Mr. Vane declines here.
The conflict–Vane’s internal conflict–is set up by his response to the dialogue between Adam and Eve that we quoted above.
“I do not quite understand you,” I said, with an uneasy foreboding as to what she meant, but a vague hope of some escape. “Surely a man must do a day’s work first!” (Chapter VI, “The Sexton’s Cottage”)
This seems fair. Bear in mind that Mr. Raven has just recently told him that he must begin to make himself at home in the world by doing something. Is he so soon to be deprived of this opportunity? If it is only through action that he can assume the existence of an individual, then why is he immediately called to lay down action in the passivity of sleep, or in the annihilation of death? We have suggested that this chain of events doesn’t quite seem to fit the way that the character development and philosophical problem of the story were being set up in the first few chapters. Mr. Vane seems to feel this incongruity, along with his natural dread of death:
I gazed into the white face of the woman, and my heart fluttered. She returned my gaze in silence.
“Let me first go home,” I resumed, “and come again after I have found or made, invented, or at least discovered something!”
He has realized that he has done nothing yet to justify his existence, and that in consequence he does not know himself as an individual. Surely, this was the lesson! He would be careful to profit from it! In point of fact, it was the lesson, but it was meant to point him to an even more immediate one:
“He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!” said the woman, turning to her husband. “Tell him he must rest before he can do anything!”
This is the insistence of a specifically Christian existentialism: the construction of self begins with the refusal of self; authentic action arises from perfect sacrifice. There seems to be nothing heroic in lying down to sleep; it appears antiheroic, and Mr. Vane feels let down by the paradoxical demand. Yet it is the closest thing to heroism that is demanded of us, and the immediate consequence of the heroic path as Kierkegaard defines it:
“Christian heroism, and indeed one perhaps sees little enough of that, is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability.” (The Sickness unto Death, Preface)
Where does this terrible aloneness and responsibility play out for Kierkegaard? On Mount Moriah, where Abraham lifts the knife to sacrifice his only son. In his masterful study of that story, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes the characteristic dual movement of the Christian hero, whom he calls the “knight of faith” in terms of the movements of a skilled dancer. The first movement, which he compares to the upward leap of a dancer (perhaps we could think of a ballet dancer doing a grand jeté), is the movement of infinite resignation, the “leap into infinity”. The second movement, which he compares to the dancer’s “sticking the landing”, landing without a sway or wobble in a ballet position, is what he specifically associates with faith. For Abraham, it is receiving Isaac back from the dead “on the strength of the absurd.” It is the practice of resurrection, of landing back in the finite reality of the body, the body literally given back after having been offered without reservation.
This is the dual movement that is required of Mr. Vane. It is the leap into infinity that terrifies him. No assurances are offered him, beyond that he will wake. He cannot go into the leap with a tether. He has no way of controlling when he will wake, and he cannot get Adam and Eve to agree to wake him. It has to be a leap into infinity: the waking has to be entirely out of his own control.
“How then am I to make use of your hospitality?” I asked.
“By accepting it to the full,” he answered.
“I do not understand.”
“In this house no one wakes of himself.”
“Why?”
“Because no one anywhere ever wakes of himself. You can wake yourself no more than you can make yourself.”
“Then perhaps you or Mrs. Raven would kindly call me!” I said, still nowise understanding, but feeling afresh that vague foreboding.
“We cannot.”
“How dare I then go to sleep?” I cried.
“If you would have the rest of this house, you must not trouble yourself about waking. You must go to sleep heartily, altogether and outright.” My soul sank within me.
Kierkegaard compares despair, the “sickness unto death” to vertigo. It is this vertigo that initially causes Mr. Vane to flee from the chamber of death: he cannot face the leap. He will be blamed for this, but blamed for cowardice, whereas his second, later refusal is more clearly an example of bad faith. This is reflected by Mr. Raven’s exhortation at his first trial:
“Do not be a coward, Mr. Vane. Turn your back on fear, and your face to whatever may come. Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed. Harm will not come to you, but a good you cannot foreknow.”
Compare this to his warning as Mr. Vane is about to fail his second trial:
“Mr. Vane,” croaked the raven, “think what you are doing! Twice already has evil befallen you—once from fear, and once from heedlessness: breach of word is far worse; it is a crime.” (Chapter XXXI, “The Sexton’s Old Horse”)
Eventually, it will become clear that Mr. Vane’s wish to be a hero makes him an antihero. His insistence on doing something worth doing prevents him from accomplishing anything worth doing; he has not yet learned the lesson that “the day begins with sleep”. We return to that scene:
“I do not quite understand you,” I said, with an uneasy foreboding as to what she meant, but a vague hope of some escape. “Surely a man must do a day’s work first!”
I gazed into the white face of the woman, and my heart fluttered. She returned my gaze in silence.
“Let me first go home,” I resumed, “and come again after I have found or made, invented, or at least discovered something!”
“He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!” said the woman, turning to her husband. “Tell him he must rest before he can do anything!”
“Men,” he answered, “think so much of having done, that they fall asleep upon it. They cannot empty an egg but they turn into the shell, and lie down!”
For me, this has been the single greatest admonishment that Lilith has brought into my life: this ruthless exposé of my worship of accomplishment, of having done. Mr. Raven’s words give me the picture of an English breakfast table. A soft-boiled egg is in its egg cup. I knock off the top, and eat the contents with a small spoon. Behold, my accomplishment for the day! How magnificent! The stupor of self-satisfaction that follows our least accomplishment is pitilessly portrayed by imagining that I curl up into the empty shell and take a nap.
This parody is a grotesque reversal of the process of birth, told by a bird, who ought to know something about eggs! I should be crawling out of my shell, extending and drying my wings. That would be progress! Instead, the most heroic “accomplishments” I can come to on my own amount to a regression, a failure to be born, and thus a progression toward decay.
In MacDonald’s sermon, “The Heart with the Treasure”, he uses a figure that ties the inability to let go of prized possession (the downfall of the rich young man in “The Way”) with this organic regression, or reversal of evolution:
“Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon, who give their lives, their best energies to the accumulation of wealth: it applies to those equally who in any way worship the transitory; who seek the praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a show in the world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art, by genius of any kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be treasured in a storehouse of earth.
Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of a more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the senses in every direction—whether lawfully or unlawfully indulged, if the joy of being is centred in them—do these words bear terrible warning. For the hurt lies not in this—that these pleasures are false like the deceptions of magic, for such they are not: pleasures they are; nor yet in this—that they pass away, and leave a fierce disappointment behind: that is only so much the better; but the hurt lies in this—that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and clings to them as its good—clings to them till it is infected and interpenetrated with their proper diseases, which assume in it a form more terrible in proportion to the superiority of its kind, that which is mere decay in the one becoming moral vileness in the other, that which fits the one for the dunghill casting the other into the outer darkness; creeps, that it may share with them, into a burrow in the earth, where its budded wings wither and damp and drop away from its shoulders, instead of haunting the open plains and the high-uplifted table-lands, spreading abroad its young pinions to the sun and the air, and strengthening them in further and further flights, till at last they should become strong to bear the God-born into the presence of its Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.” (emphasis mine)
Again and again we have to confront the paradox that action is required of us, that it is the means by which we justify our existence, and that at the same time our turning to regard that action is our great temptation, at which our wings melt off and we fall like Icarus into the sea. The Icarus figure, however, is misleading unless we imagine that the crime is not in flying too high; it is in taking our eyes off of the sun and turning them to our wings. Peter could walk on the water as long as he looked at his Goal, and not on his feet treading the waves. In her beautiful book Walking on Water, the writer Madeleine L’Engle uses this as a metaphor for the creative process, the creative life. Action that reposes in rest has the character of miracle, but it is genuine activity, of the highest nature.
I confess that the utterly passive nature of the figure of sleep in Lilith troubles me. At the end of the story, Mr. Vane will be sent back to his own world to live out his life. How does his experience of extended sleep speak to us who appear to get no such sabbatical? As MacDonald says in one of his diary poems:
If we might sit until the darkness go,
Possess our souls in patience perhaps we might;
But there is always something to be done,
And no heart left to do it. To and fro
The dull thought surges, as the driven waves fight
In gulfy channels. Oh! victorious one,
Give strength to rise, go out, and meet thee in the night.
(Diary of an Old Soul, Nov. 4)
There is clearly another kind of sleep, another kind of death, that we have to resist, to fight against with all the energy of our being. MacDonald deals with this idea magnificently in his sermon “Life”, as well as in other places. But the resistance of this temptation to false sleep (despair, Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death”) requires repose in our true center of rest:
“The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire; believes in a power that seems far from him, which is yet at the root of his fatigue itself and his need of rest—rest as far from death as is labour. To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world. To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream; to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love. ‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!’” (“Life”, Unspoken Sermons, Series II)
This sounds more like the classic knight-facing-the-dragon heroism, and indeed MacDonald uses this exact image in the immediate context of the passage just quoted from “Life”. Mr. Vane, however, is not yet at that level. He must learn how to rest before he can learn how to fight–otherwise his knightly adventures are doomed to be quixotic failures (as indeed his storming of the city of Bulika later in the story proves to be).
The sleep that Adam and Eve prescribe for him is something that is possible in the very midst of life, even in the prime of youth, at the beginning of one’s earthly career. Yes, I have found the passivity that sleep suggests to be a difficulty in the story. We should remember that Mr. Vane exhorts him to it in very active terms: “You must go to sleep heartily, altogether and outright.” And again, “Turn your back on fear, and your face to whatever may come. Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed.” To me, the phrase, “Give yourself up to the night,” suggests the symbolism of the night in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, which MacDonald admired and translated:
“Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love’s hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night. Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep, gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labour, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the gloaming of the real night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes, in the magic oil of the almond tree, and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap; never suspect it is thou, the portress of heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.” (Hymns to the Night, III, transl. George MacDonald)
For Novalis, the Night is the freedom of Love from the tyranny of sequential time with its recurring tasks. As such, it is an eternity to which he can be devoted within the compass of time, while anticipating the final resolution:
“Now I know when will come the last morning: when the light no more scares away the Night and Love, when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream….
Gladly will I bestir the deedy hands, everywhere behold where thou [the Day] hast need of me; bepraise the rich pomp of thy splendour; pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft; gladly contemplate the thoughtful pace of thy mighty, radiant clock; explore the balance of the forces and laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons; but true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter.” (Hymns to the Night, IV)
At the end of the story, Vane does get to experience the coming of the last morning “when the light no more scares away the Night and Love”. At this point, he experiences the perfect repose of death simultaneously with the active joy of life:
“I hope you have had a pleasant darkness!” said the Mother.
“Not very,” I answered, “but the waking from it is heavenly.”
“It is but begun,” she rejoined; “you are hardly yet awake!”
“He is at least clothed-upon with Death, which is the radiant garment of Life,” said Adam.
He embraced Lona his child, put an arm around me, looked a moment or two inquiringly at the princess, and patted the head of the leopardess.
“I think we shall meet you two again before long,” he said, looking first at Lona, then at me.
“Have we to die again?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, with a smile like the Mother’s; “you have died into life, and will die no more; you have only to keep dead. Once dying as we die here, all the dying is over. Now you have only to live, and that you must, with all your blessed might. The more you live, the stronger you become to live.”
“But shall I not grow weary with living so strong?” I said. “What if I cease to live with all my might?”
“It needs but the will, and the strength is there!” said the Mother. “Pure life has no weakness to grow weary withal. THE Life keeps generating ours.—Those who will not die, die many times, die constantly, keep dying deeper, never have done dying; here all is upwardness and love and gladness.” (Chapter, XLIV, “The Waking”)
However, after experiencing the glory of the dawn of the eternal morning, and making it all the way to the throne of God in the heavenly city, he is sent back to earth, to wait for his time–and he is left wondering if his experiences were all a nested series of dreams:
I have never again sought the mirror. The hand sent me back: I will not go out again by that door! “All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.”
Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through. Sometimes when I am abroad, a like thing takes place; the heavens and the earth, the trees and the grass appear for a moment to shake as if about to pass away; then, lo, they have settled again into the old familiar face! At times I seem to hear whisperings around me, as if some that loved me were talking of me; but when I would distinguish the words, they cease, and all is very still. I know not whether these things rise in my brain, or enter it from without. I do not seek them; they come, and I let them go.
Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more.
I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.
Novalis says, “Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.” (Chapter XLVII, “The Endless Ending”)
Notice the reference to Novalis with which MacDonald brings the whole circle of the story around to its resting point, in a motion reminiscent of the conclusion of Dante’s Divina Commedia:
“At this point power failed high fantasy
But, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire impelled
By the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.” (Del Paradiso, Canto XXXIII)
There is then, an active embrace of holy Death that is the first action required for the one who would be an authentic individual. In Christian terms, this can be thought of as “dying to self.” We could simply have said, “Lilith is about dying to self” and been done with it. The reason why I have so far avoided that terminology is that it is so common as to be open to much misunderstanding. The first misunderstanding is that the purpose of the Christian life is to get rid of self. Kierkegaard, the ever careful thinker, avoids this mistake:
“And the relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself.” (The Sickness Unto Death, Part I)
He sees the human spirit as a relation, as that which actively relates our finite “half” to our infinite “half”, holding together the human synthesis of soul and body. The self he sees as that relation’s relation to itself, that is, our spirit’s active relating to itself. “Despair” he regards as the disease of the human spirit, its imbalance, and since it is a disease of the eternal part of us, it is something which is sustained in us by our will–that is, we are responsible for it at every moment.
When we talk about “getting rid of self”, what we often are talking about is getting rid of the disease. This will have to involve a turning of the human spirit by which the imbalance is righted. Kierkegaard writes:
“Such a relation, which relates to itself, a self, must either have established itself or been established by something else.
If the relation which relates to itself has been established by something else, then of course the relation is the third term, but then this relation, the third term, is a relation which relates in turn to that which has established the whole relation.
Such a derived, established relation is the human self, a relation which relates to itself, and in relating to itself relates to something else.”
Since the human self essentially relates to its existential Source, the imbalance can be corrected when it relates to itself, not in isolation, but in reference to what established it. This gets to the heart of the riddle of human selfhood: we must relate to ourselves, but can only do so healthily through our primary relation to that which is outside of and made ourselves. This is a surprisingly difficult lesson to learn. The lure of action that promises to define us in a positive way hides our true motives from ourselves, and we often discover them only through repeated failure. The worship of “having done” is hard to break. As Mr. Raven says, the riddles go on asking themselves, demanding an answer, until we ourselves become true. We will continue to follow Mr. Vane’s education by the universe as he exhausts the possibilities of evasion.