5/15/2023 0 Comments Call of the sea chapter 1Universe to darken their brows and whiten their hair. They do not welcome casual listeners or informers or self-servers and have the fate of the Is always full of agitation because God and his angels live there and debate high policy, and flush out treachery and rebellion. The streets make me tense and nervous, and sometimes even in my locked-in flat I find myself unable to sleep or sit at ease because of the rustlings and whisperings that agitate the lower air. It is not easy, after all these years, to learn not to see, to learn discretion about the meaning of what I think I see. Perhaps they are only straining against theĬold wind that blows in from the murky ocean, and I am trying too hard to make sense of the sight. Perhaps I exaggerate, or cannot resist dwelling on my difference from them, cannot resist the drama of our contrastedness. They seem consumed and distracted, their eyes smartingĪs they tug against turmoils incomprehensible to me. I have so little understanding of the striving that seems to accompany their most ordinary acts. It is not that they are mysterious, but that their strangeness disarms me. I have no inkling of their plight, though I keep my eyes open and observe what I can, but I fear that I recognise little of what I see. Screen and guessing at the tireless alarms which afflict people I see in my strolls. Now I live the half-life of a stranger, glimpsing interiors through the television I live in a small town by the sea, as I have all my life, though for most of it it was by a warm green ocean a long way from here. Sooner or later we have to attend to that. I have time on my hands, I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. What I mean is, I don't know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something I've forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I don't wish it toīe. It is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and it then led to that and the other, and now here we are. Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses. I long for night eachĪrid day, even though I dread the darkness and its limitless chambers and shifting shadows. Sometimes I hear music in the distance, played in the open and coming to me as a muted whisper. More solidly, and hear the play of voices more clearly, as if they were happening for the first time. In the darkness I lose a sense of space, and in this nowhere I feel myself As if coming to live here has shut one narrow door and opened another into a widening concourse. Uncanny noiselessness that hovered above words. I marvel how the hours of darkness have come to be so precious to me, how night silences have turned out so full of mumbles and whispers when before they had been so terrifyingly still, so tense with the To take away more of the remaining hours of darkness. It doesn't matter, just that I don't want her turning up in the deep hours of the night, shattering its pregnant silences with a racket of explanations and regrets, and blurting out plans Maybe it was only one of those gestures that was complete when it was made, to say that she had thought of me, in the sure expectation that I would take comfortįrom that, which I do. Though, in the card she did say today after six. It's late now, so I don't suppose she'll be coming after all, not today. In the card she said that I should call her if her coming was a problem, but She sent me a card because I don't have a telephone in the flat, I refuse to have one. She said she'll call later, and sometimes when she says that she does.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |