‘But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red — even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again?— save that it fades, save that it undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual — this scene also. Blindness returns as one moves and one leaf repeats another. Loveliness returns as one looks, with all its train of phantom phrases. One breathes in and out substantial breath; down in the valley the train draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.
‘But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture-book had stopped and had said, “Look. This is the truth.”
‘So I was thinking as I came along Shaftesbury Avenue to-night. I was thinking of that page in the picture-book. And when I met you in the place where one goes to hang up one’s coat I said to myself, “It does not matter whom I meet. All this little affair of ‘being’ is over. Who this is I do not know; nor care; we will dine together.” So I hung up my coat, tapped you on the shoulder, and said, “Sit with me.”
‘Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and breadcrumbs. I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it you; but whether there is substance or truth in it I do not know. Nor do I know exactly where we are. What city does that stretch of sky look down upon? Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar? I do not at this moment feel certain.
‘I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now, to tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of apparently solid objects and say, “Are you hard?” I have seen so many different things, have made so many different sentences. I have lost in the process of eating and drinking
