John Gardner

"Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. ''"So may you all."

Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall: is it not hard? He smashes me against it. Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now, sing of walls! Sing!

Terrible, he whispers. Terrible. He laughs and lets out fire.

“As you see it it is, while the seeing lasts. Time as coffin; dark nightmare history. But where the water was rigid, there will be fish, and men will survive on their flesh until spring. It is coming, my brother. Believe it or not. Though you murder the world, transmogrify life into I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and the rains will cleanse it. The world will burn green- sperm build again. By this I kill you.”

The Geats build up the fire, prepare to sleep.

And now, silence.

Darkness.

It is time.

I understood at last the look in his eyes. He was insane.

"I sing of walls," I howl. "Hooray for the hardness of walls!"

What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way--and so did me

Pity poor Hrothgar,

Grendel's foe!

Pity poor Grendel,

O,O,O!

Nihil ex nihilo, I always say.

“You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shirk from—the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment—that’s what you make them recognize, embrace! You are mankind, or man’s condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain.”

Pity poor Grengar,

Hrothdel's foe!

Down goes the whirlpool:

Eek! No, no!