Bobby is yanked, yanked and hurled over the heads of his elders. His elders are sixteen graying men with bad complexions and bad humors. They are often sullen and sulky; this has rubbed off on Bobby, who is a sullen youth of fifteen. Given time, he will grow to be a serious man, one dedicated to certain propositions. Given time, we will see the blooming of his moroseness into an unrelenting need to know more. But all we see, all we know is that Bobby, young Bobby, is being jettisoned over the heads of his elders.
How they got here we don't know. We don't care. They are here. No one cares to know why, how, since when. The sixteen zitty old men are here: they are here. Their heads, from Bobby's point of view, sail, zoom, whoosh past, the epitome of impermanence, but they are here: this we know.
For example: one elder coughs. He has had a lung ailment since his forty-seventh year and is seldom silent. Coughing, ever coughing, this elder causes his peers no end of embarrassment. While old, they do not like to stress this aspect of theirs in colloquia, which are often geared to solving the needs of the young, like Bobby. They have never chastised this elder for his cough, for it is not something he can avoid, nor is it permissible to chastise one's peer if one is an elder: and they are all elders, these men. They chastise youths, who are young and amenable to change. At a certain age, it is true, one loses one's ability to adapt to new things: a fact of life. Age brings inertia: a fact of life. And Bobby, why, he has years of painful development ahead: a fact of life. Life!
The elders are graduates of famous and great schools: the school of pain, the school of joy, the school of error, the school of greatness, the school of love, the school of too-much-triviality, the school of affliction, Harvard, Yale. The sixteen have gone through much and are proud, for they are now repositories of information vital to teh continuing development of youth. It was they, once, youth. Now it, youth, is in their hands.
Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. They go about the education thus: with force. Each boy is different. One demands subtlety, one requires blunt thrusts. One needs badgers and boasts, one wants trust and slow growth. Bobby, he needs force. But force: where is it really (now let us look at this objectively) to be found among sixteen (we are graying) old men? True physical force? The ability to wrest things from their perches and hurl them pell-mell to divers states of collapse? The strength needed to unhorse afflictions and yet leave undamaged the boy? It is lacking (we can see that) and so they purchase a youngish man, a weightlifter by trade and a very promising man what's more. A man, therefore, who has more to give than to take, and, we are assured by his repeated assurances, fully in possession of the currently necessary sources. A father, a mother, an uncle, a gradfather: these he has; he is a man in no need of more elders. The elders, sixteen graying men, concentrate on the unfortunate.
The weightlifter, then, has hurled Bobby over the heads of his elders. From Bobby's point of view, the world sails past, this little part of the world which he thinks is the whole world. Sixteen graying heads, sullen, sulky, repositories of much, sail by. Back there he can still see the hand that hurled him: he can trace it back to that beautifully developed body, the lines, the curves. It is shirtless, well bronzed, smooth. From Bobby's point of view it is worthy of emulation. Though his elders have not spoken to him yet about it, he is sure they would agree: worthy of emulation, quite. He will speak with the weightlifter, he decides, and discover his secret. Then he will apply it.
One of the elders has reached a decision: no more punishment. Bobby, he thinks, has suffered far and away enough: his learning has gotten beyond a certain point. It is time, thinks the elder, for a quieter approach: no more jarring thumps, no more jogs and shoves. Subtlety is in order, it seems: subtlety and honesty. No more violence: no more. This elder scratches his neck: a boil explodes silently.
Bobby is falling, falling, falling. His world is sailing past. He is not old enough for metaphors, yet some are abvious. One of his elders sees a metaphor in Bobby's falling, but he does not mention it. Banal, he thinks. Bobby is falling, falling. He is coming closer to the ground. He is inches away. He is one inch away. He has hit the ground, head first. The whole weight of his body is applied to his neck. It snaps. All rush over to Bobby, all closely surround the corpse.