The whiteness stretches before him, a plain square with sharp corners that seem far away. He breezes over the expanse expectant, looking for some change in the landscape, some variance that he can call inspiration. He finds none, and so he starts without it.
Color, he decides, thinking of necessities. “A great blue sky that stretches overhead.” That looks better, but now the ground is far too empty. “A rolling, green hill, dotted with bright wildflowers.” He looks at this new view with satisfaction for a moment; the hard corners and edges have practically disappeared. Still, something missing.
Movement, he realizes. “A rustling wind that sweeps the grass, and clouds that scuttle overhead and race their shadows on the hills.” It is so, and now the expanse, once white and barren, seems alive. He takes a breath of the clean air, tasting it, and finds himself unfulfilled. There is nothing in it.
Presence, he thinks, and this is the hard part. “A city,” he allows, after much deliberation. “With tall gray buildings and narrow streets, that houses a press of people that live gray, narrow, hustling lives.” This changes things, and already the energy of his view has shifted, so he says, “Perhaps some rain, then. A cloudy day, close overhead so they don’t realize what they’re missing.” The atmosphere is thicker, at least. But now what?
Focus, he tells himself sternly. “In the third-highest building, on the sixteenth floor, there is a a smallish, gray, quiet room, inhabited in practice but not in spirit.” He finds himself within its walls and looks around him thoughfully. “A bed, a chair, a table, a desk,” he provides as furnishings. “A wall of books. The kind a man buys thinking he should read them—classics, poetry, philosophy—but never does because he has convinced himself he would never understand them.” That adds something, and he considers what to do next.
The Man, he knows, is the next requirement, but the gap waiting to be filled in with this person’s qualities doesn’t particularly impress him. “Maybe a woman instead, with quiet hands and eyes that have turned gray from always seeing it.” No, she seems shallow there, a cardboard cut-out in the room. He waves her away and tries again. “A man, uneasy without knowing why, hunched into his chair by the desk, sleepless and restless beneath the gray sky.” Yes, that’s much better.
Substance, he declares. “A typewriter before him” it appears accordingly, “whirring tiredly, unsympathetic to his slow attempts at forming letters, words, thoughts, ideas. The Man struggles with the black machine in the gray room, fruitless to articulate the bright wheeling ideas to move and change his sight.”
Who is this? He asks himself out of habit, and the answer unnerves him. You, of course.
Whose life is this? He wonders, and answers himself. Mine.
He blinks and shakes his head and looks down at the product of his morning. No good, of course—depressing, unoriginal, too real for him to use. He picks up the sharp corners heavy with mentality, brings them together. He crumples city, sky, earth, room, man into a compact ball, thinking somberly of regret and arcaneness. It sails through the air, this balled-up world, and lands in the graveyard of its fellows, rejected.
Inspiration, he sighs wistfully, longingly. He settles the pen in his hand and leans in again, searching the sharp-cornered white expanse for something other than himself.
