...of scholars

A few drops of rain began to fall as they immediately dissolved the circle of witnesses. Putting up the collar of his lumberjacket, Oliveira turned his nose into the cold wind and began to walk in no direction in particular. He was sure that the old man had not been seriously injured, but he kept on seeing his face, which could almost be described as placid, perplexed maybe, as they carried him in the stretcher and spoke friendly, comforting words to him, "Allez, pepere, c'est rien, ca!" from the stretcher-bearer, a red-head who must have said the same thing to everybody. "A complete lack of communication," Oliveira thought. "It's not so much that we're alone, that's a well-known fact that any fool can plainly see. Being alone is basically being alone on a certain level in which other lonelinesses could communicate with us if that were the case. But bring on any conflict, an accident in the street or a declaration of war, provoke the brutal crossing of different levels, and a man who is perhaps an outstanding Sanskrit scholar or a quantum physicist becomes a pepere in the eyes of the stretcher-bearer who arrives on the scene. Edgar Allan Poe on a stretcher. Verlaine in the hands of a sawbones. Nerval and Artaud facing psychiatrists. What could that Italian Galen have known about Keats as he bled him and helped him die of hunger? If men like him are silent, as is most likely, the others will triumph blindly, without evil intent, of course, without knowing that the consumptive over there, that injured man lying naked on that bed, are doubly alone, surrounded by beings who move about as if behind glass, from a different place in time..."

[Hopscotch, Cortazar, J.]