a shot in the dark

Now listen to me, he said. And we began to address each other slowly and formally as people often do when seriousness impedes ease; some stately dance is required. Listen. Listen, he said. Our old children are just about grown. Why do you want a new child? Haven’t we agreed often, haven’t we said that it had become noticeable that life is short and sorrowful? Haven’t we said the words “gone” and “where”? Haven’t we sometimes in the last few years used the word “terrible” and we mean to include in it the word “terror”? Everyone knows this about life. Though of course some fools never stop singing its praises.

But they’re right, I said in my turn. Yes, and this is in order to encourage the young whom we have, after all, brought into the world - they must not be abandoned. We must, I said, continue pointing out simple and worthwhile sights such as - in the countryside - hills folding into one another in light-green spring or white winter, the sky which is always astonishing either in its customary blueness or in the configuration of clouds - the way they’re pushed in their softest parts by the air’s breath and change shape and direction and density. Not to mention our own beloved city crowded with day and night workers, shoppers, walkers, the subway trains which many people fear but they’re so handsomely lined with pink to dark dark brown faces, golden tans and yellow scattered amongst them. It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has begun to guess.

No moment in human experience approaches in its intensity this experience of the solitary earth’s. The later phases of spring, when her foot is in at the door, are met with a conventional gaiety. But her first unavowed presence is disconcerting; silences fall in company - the wish to be either alone or with a lover is avowed by some look or some spontaneous movement - the window being thrown open, the glance away up the street. In cities the traffic lightens and quickens; even buildings take such feeling of depth that the streets might be rides cut through a wood. What is happening is only acknowledged between strangers, by looks, or between lovers. Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties. To the person out walking that first evening of spring, nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient: darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but to dream. Atoms of light quiver between the branches of stretching-up black trees. It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonised livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights - they are pursued by the scent of violets sold on the kerb.

Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange as artists. I never could understand how an audience could sit there and *look* at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his tongue, or a horn player collecting spit, or a pianist like a black cat strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they *saw* had anything to do with the music.