He was sitting
in his armchair reading a book. It was early evening. Curtains
billowing gently. Everything was still and quiet. A bright sickle
moon shone through the french windows.
He looked up. He could see himself in the mirror across the room.
Surprisingly old, and feeling tired. He could see the lines on
his face, the thin hair. He felt a slight but fundamental jolt,
as if he were riding on a slowly moving train which had stopped.
He had been reading a book, and had turned to a page with a stain
across it. The stain reminded him of the texture of an old wall,
like the walls of alleyways in Rome or Venice or the East End
of London. He put his hand upon it and the pages crumbled away,
leaving a hole which he could see through.
He was looking into a vast shifting ocean. He had never before
felt such stillness. It was as though the ocean was flowing through
him, removing all divisions between himself and the room, the
book, the moon, the garden. He was simultaneously watching himself
from several different points of view. Every angle seemed subtly
altered, widened. Faint voices came from every direction, like
the calling of birds.
The voices seemed to be an intrinsic part of the composition
of the ocean, their echoes and eddies and complex reverberations
opening out perspective after perspective, all slowly changing
and merging and reforming. He focussed on several of the voices,
one after the other, and found that individually they were undistinguished,
vague whispers, nothing of them stayed in his memory. But experienced
as a mass, the voices formed a huge ocean of code which spoke
immediately and directly to him, more intimately than language
ever could. |
