| OCR Text |
Show 109 worked out the positioning of the other things. He laid the cane across the arms of the chair beside the lute, and turned to the dwindling supply on the floor. He knew, as soon as he stepped back to look, that he had a problem, and that it was a familiar one. He had learned by now better than to trust his instincts, because he knew his instincts were formed by first impressions. He was aware that whatever distribution of objects he happened to make first in a study of this kind would lodge in his mind as the norm, and that that was artificial. He had learned to disregard a norm established that way. But he knew that as soon as he began rearranging the objects he would have misgivings, because the new combinations violated his instincts, never mind that the instincts were specious. His instincts, for example, told him that those objects still on the floor should remain on the floor, near the foot of the chair, giving the composition two centers of interest held together by the sweep of the paisley. His immediate mistrust told him that that was only one of an infinite series of alternatives any one of which could easily be better or worse than the original, and that it was impossible to visualize them without having seen them, and therefore evaluation was impossible. These spectral alternatives were, in a sense, simultaneous, and to objectify one of them instead of another by moving things around was merely to invite a secondary instinct that was as arbitrarily founded and as untrustworthy as the first one. There was also the descent to particulars: did you leave the stones in the basket or strew some of them onto the paisley, as though the basket had been tipped? Would that reinforce or merely duplicate the seeds from the blue goblet overhead? Did you leave the little books stacked in a casual heap, some showing spines, some not, with the hardened and chipped leather bindings the center of interest? Did |
