Back in No Time. Brion Gysin

it must have been more than a mile from the War Memorial past Great Hall and Little Hall, past the refectory with its raftered and emblazoned roof, forty feet or more above our heads, through a low, vaulted cloister with green stained-glass windows, up to the flight of broad steps which led into the abbey church. From within the church itself you could enter what I suppose must have been very similar cloisters leading to the monastery and the cells of the monks, but I never passed more than a few yards beyond those great doors into those strangely repulsive, smelly halls. At that point you were almost overcome by the odor of stale incense in the folds of black serge robes.

      We saw the monks of the monastery enter into the church almost every day, but while they were close to us they were also completely apart. We knew only those few who taught in the school, and even they seemed almost unrecognizable as they sang from under their hoods, sitting back in the shadowed choir stalls. On Sundays certain young boys of the school, dressed in red and white, stood in front of these same stalls and lifted their soprano voices high into the nave of the church. That sound soared and fell back against carved stone and carved wood into the wave of bass voices which seemed to echo from under the dark hoods of the monks. The school was famous for its Gregorian chant, that indescribable music of male voices. The organist was a handsome, stalwart young Russian who had left the concert halls to enter the monastery. The monk named Dom Thomas, who trained and led the choir, looked so much a small neutered cat that you wondered where the music could be hidden in him. These two antitypes forged music which I have never been able to forget.

      The great windows, which hung above the part of the church to which we schoolboys were confined, were filled with a greenish glass that cast an almost submarine gloom over the assembled congregation even on the brightest of days. The windows of the transept struck great shafts of light through the haze, and from time to time picked out some boy in the choir who seemed to be the only singer, as his voice blended with the others in a vibrating column of sound which shook the ribs of the whole church. The bass voices flowed out in oily waves and the male soprano echoed back and forth, searching through the columns of stone. In the green sea-light we seemed to be crouched on the hard-beaten, sandy bottom of the sea, filled with an unreasoning despair and sadness, until the organ burst forth with its triumphant toccata and suddenly an army with banners seemed to charge above our heads and meet another army in full flight. The shock of their collision almost brought down the vaulting.

      The monks who entered the monastery were chosen, I think, as much for their compatibility as for their religious vocation. There were a number of qualifications. Many of the novices who petitioned the abbot for entrance were the younger sons of rich families, and although they were obliged to take a vow of poverty, they were also obliged to bring a considerable dowry with them when they came. If the monks therefore were at least theoretically poor, the monastery itself was extremely rich and took good care of its investments. The monks were well provided for and their poverty was really only nominal. Their religious duties were numerous and undoubtedly monotonous, but they also had a great deal of time before eternity began in which to occupy themselves with works. If a monk wished to engage in a craft or a hobby he was provided with the very best tools and implements, which were paid for out of the common fund. Their interests ranged from things like beekeeping or carpentry to the arts and the sciences.

      The beekeeping monk persuaded his bees to produce a delicate, thin honey the color of pale jade which had the fragrance of spiced pinks and apple blossoms. This honey he sold to the schoolboys at a price so exorbitant that we were led to doubt the nonprofit basis of his little enterprise.

      I did not like any of the monks whom I knew with the exception of the art master, who was also a sculptor. Before entering the monastery he had studied in Paris and he was often in trouble with the abbot, who did not appreciate modern art. Dom Hubert was a backslider, I fear, and there is some evidence to show that he read movie magazines. He loved his stoneyard, for it took him away from the rather limited company of his fellow monks, and gave him physical exercise. He would attack a huge block of the local limestone with such furious energy that he often finished with a miniature Madonna and misshapen Child, where, with the same material and a little more care, he might have produced a colossus. I have often wondered since what attacks of temperament he was trying to overcome by turning stone into dust.

      One day he was called upon to make a bas-relief, and he started in grimly upon a large piece of stone. He would have liked to make something else, I knew, but the abbot had imposed the condition that he confine himself to religious subjects. As the relief grew under the blows of his chisel, the Madonna’s high cheekbones, large eye sockets, long bob, and awkward gesture toward the child grew more and more familiar. Her mouth was wide and generous and her jawline firm and square. Dom Hubert smiled as he cut a Latin inscription into the stone. STELLA SACRAE SILVAE. When the abbot first saw this work of art he was pleased with it, but even he may possibly have seen the resemblance to Garbo before he translated the inscription into STAR OF HOLLYWOOD. It was too much, I am afraid. Dom Hubert lost his workshop, and I worked on there alone.

      It was about this same time that the observatory in the monastery garden burned to the ground. It had originally been built for a monk who had obtained permission to study astronomy, and the abbot had taken a sort of medieval pride in his work when it was first begun. A monastery should, by tradition, be a center of learning, and it was felt that an accomplished astronomer would be an asset to the place. This monk, let us call him Dom Griphen, was provided with a large telescope and other necessary equipment, and he was given to understand that epoch-making discoveries were expected of him as soon as possible.

      Some years passed and no new planet swam into the field of his telescope, but he explained that he was engaged in lengthy calculations which needed some considerable passage of time for their corroboration, and he was allowed to continue undisturbed. Each day, as soon as religious duties were fulfilled, he disappeared up the long walks and alleys of the monastery garden to lock himself into the summer house which had been turned into an observatory. He appeared only in church and at the necessary meals where no conversation is allowed, and thus escaped close questioning from the other monks as to the manner in which his experiments were progressing. Several years passed, during which no one but the abbot had exchanged a word with him. One day he was asked to appear at a convocation to announce to the assembled monks the results of his years of observation and calculation.

      In a short time the grapevine which connected the school and the monastery brought the great news to us. It appeared that Dom Griphen had discovered for certain that the day did not consist of a period of twenty-four hours. For years, for centuries, or perhaps even longer, the world had been laboring under the delusion that the solar day could be divided exactly into twenty-four hours, 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. This was a colossal error, and Brother Griphen had the proof of it.

      The grapevine had brought no exact information as to the margin of error. Some impressionable and slack-tongued brothers went so far as to claim that there was a considerable divergence between the result of his calculations and the conventional, accepted solar day. Some claimed that it accounted for the long days in summer, and the short days in winter, but as the monks were all obliged to get up in the middle of the night and troop into the church to sing, it could hardly make much difference to them. It was decided by the abbot that the great discovery should not be made known to the world until it had been referred to Rome, for it might conflict with some point of doctrine. It may be, also, that the abbot was a little skeptical.

      Dom Griphen was told that the College of Cardinals must study the matter, and he was warned that this body might take years to decide on it. He was a little discouraged, for he remembered questions that had not been settled in a lifetime or two, and he was afraid that they might not decide upon the matter until after his own death. Dom Griphen had realized while very young that the world was in moral error, and for that reason he had left it. Now he was persuaded that the very physical world was continually presenting the brethren with an error in time itself. The hours were striking at every breath they drew, and striking false. He proposed to the abbot that the error should be rectified at least in the world of school and monastery over which he had jurisdiction.

      Father Abbot hastily explained that such a thing was impossible until they had received word from Rome. The Church Temporal should deal with Time. The abbot suggested further that Dom Griphen might