Furthermore, and despite the belief the Stones unhesitatingly expressed in the interview, I was not attached to All Souls during my years at Oxford, and not only that but had never set foot in that strict and exclusive college, and did not do so, in fact, until last summer, 1996, when I was invited there by the kind musicologist Meg Bent after she read my novel. I imagine that the title had forestalled or imposed itself on their knowledge of me, I mean Mr. and Mrs. Stone’s. But at least they had said I was a nice young man, which is something to be very grateful for, even if retrospectively. As I passed by the bookstore later that day and saw them through the window in their habitual places at ladder and desk, I waved to them without stopping and hoped that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Stone ever runs the risk of having in reality to consult with a ghost or the air in the silence of their shop; that is, I hoped that when the time comes for one of them to die, they both die together.
9
And it is something to be very grateful for, even if retrospectively. I said that without intending much by it, only now do I notice it. Though I can be agreeable (I know I can but don’t always want to be, and never am with my many compatriots who are disagreeable and venomous and always think the worst: too many slanderers for too many years in this domain of brutality which death passes through with rusting tongues, making somberest shadow flow, and relentlessly); I’m no longer young and may not have been young then either in those distant days when I was thirty-two or thirty-three, long past the age of twenty-one, which, fortunately, was the age of legal adulthood in my time, and also past the age of twenty-seven, so decisive that Joseph Conrad called it “the shadow line” (perhaps it was decisive only in his day); the age of thirty had also been attained and left behind by the time I went to Oxford, the symbolic age beyond which, for instance, dying young, in the traditional sense, is almost impossible, though the modern view is more indulgent, one dies young at seventy-five: people say, “There was still so much left for him to do,” as if what we do were what justified our lives or what we miss about our dead, and not their presence and their gestures and their unbiased account of events or, even more, their listening attentiveness to our own account. The times become old times all too easily and are cast off, and what went before them becomes antediluvian, and yet they all gradually and deceptively overlap, we sometimes think there are no borders or abrupt stops or brutal cuts, that endings and beginnings are never marked out with the dividing line that, at other times, however, we think we see in retrospect; and that belief is deceptive, too, because neither the one nor the other exists, or only as an enormous exception: not the sure, clean slice — splinters always go flying — nor the juxtaposition or welter of confused and indistinguishable days — there are always forgotten patches and blotted out periods, I know them, to help us see the illusory limits. It’s all more mysterious than that, more like an artificial prolongation, attenuating and inert, of what has already ceased, a ceremonial resistance to yielding or to marking the beginning of what is to come, like the streetlamps that stay lit for a while when day has already dawned in the great cities and towns and train stations and empty village depots; they stand there still, blinking and upright, in the face of the natural light that advances to make them superfluous. At that hour, which is only witnessed by very early risers or the very nocturnal or very insomniac, there occurs, for brief moments, the visible manifestation — the metaphor — of how time, respectful time, behaves and what it consists of, for in time there is always civility and courtesy and even dissemblement, and at that hour, more than during the threadbare moment of twilight, time can be seen for what it is. These electric lights pretend that it’s still night, that their assistance is still necessary, they make as if not to perceive the conclusion of their reign, and the daylight, in turn, pretends not to see them and tolerates them, knowing that these waning lights are no longer a threat, and even appears to slow its own unfurling a bit as if to concede them time to grow accustomed to the arrival of their own futility and the idea of their cessation (“Put out the light, and then put out the light,” Othello had to say it to himself twice to take it in, even if he had already decided to do it), not forcing them to flee as soon as day-break looms white on the horizon, but only to withdraw, without being routed and in an orderly fashion, as armies once agreed on a cease-fire to allow the enemy to collect and count the dead and, in that way, begin to grow accustomed to the strange idea of their cessation.
I see them sometimes from my house, the streetlamps that hang from the noble building across the way, with its slate roof which this winter’s snow slipped off even while it began to build up on the neighboring tiles; the slate forced it to keep trying and make an effort and the snow — which is whiter than skin — kept slipping off and melting onto the plaza until finally it stayed. I see the streetlamps, and other things, too, from my balcony on insomniac mornings or when I’ve been treacherously awakened or in the aftermath of reckless revelries, nineteenth-century streetlamps hanging from the wall, their bulbs useless now, and the men and women who walk past them on hurried feet left their beds a while ago and may have travelled in trains from the city’s outskirts to its center, and in those glowing lamps they can see a reminder of the sheets or perhaps the body they left without wanting to, a reminder that for many other people the night still goes on, though dawn has already broken and the light is expanding around them as they walk or wait for a bus, lifting one foot and then the other in place, like tired wading birds — dark night still painted in their eyes — thinking dimly about what they left behind at home and what awaits them over the course of the unending workday, and by the the time the workday ends and they go back, their home will no longer be the same, and perhaps the beloved body from which they parted will have betrayed them. The woman looks at the streetlamps and remembers the man whose scent she still carries on her, who stayed behind in her bed, egotistically asleep. She’s an elegant woman who is almost no longer young, though she still is with a little effort and care on special occasions, she certainly was last night, her low neckline held deep shadows, that dress was bunched up and tossed over a chair, already forgotten this morning, a ghost, she’s dressed soberly now and warmly, she won’t see the young man again, the man who madly ripped that dress off her, more because he was young than from the desire to take it off, he’ll go when he wakes up, without leaving a note, he may even steal something, she’s quite certain he will, it doesn’t matter, the sharp smell of him will be left between the sheets, and the bus doesn’t come. The man looks at the streetlamps and thinks of the woman who gets up later than he does, she goes on sleeping or impatiently pretending to sleep as he prepares to go out into the world, making coffee in the weak light of dawn, she’s not thinking about him right now. He’s a middle-aged man, well-groomed, his hairline receding, it is not within his power to keep her, or only through economics, through his liberal hand, and money is transmutable, substitutable, many people have it, he’s not the only one, and it’s hard to earn, lugging his briefcase around early and late, he’s got nothing that anyone else doesn’t have, and she could find another, future means of support during the day, the days, too many days in which to go knocking, under some pretext, at other doors, and the mystery of this today, her today, which hasn’t yet begun, will await him at his return, added and alien to the sum of too many unknown yesterdays and no tomorrow, the bus isn’t coming and both of them, woman and man, who don’t see or know each other, look at the incongruous lights still lit beneath the sun that advances and makes them pathetic and insignificant, though they are the respectful and benign testament to what has already ceased but once existed: until the sleepy hand of some civil servant takes note of the waste and puts out the light, and then puts it out.