I had been, as Ive said, half unconsciously, looking, watching, trying to find that quality again. The quality to which Id given the tag, the wave-length. For it was like suddenly touching a high tension wire. Of being, briefly, on a different, high, vibrating current, of the familiar becoming transparent. Well, and when it happened, I did not immediately recognise it, for perhaps I had already made too much of a fetish of what you had made of that moment in the lecture room I wanted the same thing to happen. When it did happen, it was ordinary, just as it had been with you, talking about education in a routine lecture. And of course, I did not expect it just there, was halfway through the moment before I recognised it, and might even, if I had not been suddenly stung into attention, have missed it altogether.
And again, I suppose it wont seem much when I write it. Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin.
Ordinary everyday experiences can be like that.
I was walking down the street outside London University. It was a late afternoon. May I think it was; at any rate, it was not yet summer. It had been raining. Things were glistening in the street lights. Do you find too that about the time the sun goes down the world gets brighter, and more intense. And sometimes very sad. Particularly when it has been raining. Well, Ill get on I know that atmospheres or sights that move one person leave another cold. I had been walking briskly to keep warm; it was a typical English spring day, as cold as winter! Outside the University entrance, which I pass often enough, since I live near there, I slowed and began glancing in at the great porticoes and pillars, the formal pompousness of the place, and I was thinking that such impersonality, formality, is how one can most easily identify a place of learning school, university, college, and that this atmosphere in itself must set a condition of thinking for a young person being educated in it. I saw a man come down those steps, but this was a time for people to be going home, and there was a steady stream of them coming across to the gates. I was looking at them idly and thinking how tinily unimportant these human beings looked beside the great cold buildings that were supposed to be their servants, and that no young thing learning there could ever believe that human beings are more important than their institutions. Words, teachers, textbooks could say one thing: the building itself shouted the opposite.
Ordinary everyday experiences can be like that.
I was walking down the street outside London University. It was a late afternoon. May I think it was; at any rate, it was not yet summer. It had been raining. Things were glistening in the street lights. Do you find too that about the time the sun goes down the world gets brighter, and more intense. And sometimes very sad. Particularly when it has been raining. Well, Ill get on I know that atmospheres or sights that move one person leave another cold. I had been walking briskly to keep warm; it was a typical English spring day, as cold as winter! Outside the University entrance, which I pass often enough, since I live near there, I slowed and began glancing in at the great porticoes and pillars, the formal pompousness of the place, and I was thinking that such impersonality, formality, is how one can most easily identify a place of learning school, university, college, and that this atmosphere in itself must set a condition of thinking for a young person being educated in it. I saw a man come down those steps, but this was a time for people to be going home, and there was a steady stream of them coming across to the gates. I was looking at them idly and thinking how tinily unimportant these human beings looked beside the great cold buildings that were supposed to be their servants, and that no young thing learning there could ever believe that human beings are more important than their institutions. Words, teachers, textbooks could say one thing: the building itself shouted the opposite.
I was watching this man for some reason, and thinking that as I stood still I was getting cold. This was my strongest thought that I was cold. At the same time I thought that I knew this man. All at once there welled up in me a strong feeling of knowledge of him no, not just friendship, and remember that I am sixty years old, and not a romantic girl. I cant say more than this: I cant remember a time when Ive felt so powerful a kinship with someone, as if I really knew someone through and through, and was linked deeply with him. As this feeling faded, leaving me rather astonished and even amused at it, I realised that of course I knew him: it was Frederick Larson. Perhaps you know the name? No, he is not a well-known person, but I do not think it is really a foolish question. For one thing, how often does one say to a friend or acquaintance about another, Do you know so and so, and he does improbably. But in this case there is more. It turns out that as we Ill explain the we in a moment, meet each other, and attract others, in fact we are already in the same orbit, if I can put it like that. We know each other, or have friends in common. The actual meeting is only a confirmation of an existing link. Anyway Frederick knows your name, and your work, and he says that in fact he met you once, but there were people there another lecture, it is doubtful you will remember, if you ever heard, his name.
When he came up to the gate and saw me standing there he said smiling: And now tell me about yourself.
Ill explain. It is an old joke. It was twenty-five years ago that I first heard of him through my sister Marjorie. She was with her husband in Greece. He was an archeologist. He got some form of blood disease, and was a long time ill before he died. During this time, Frederick Larson, who was an old friend of his, befriended him and Marjorie. He was an archeologist, too. He got long leave to be with his friend, my sisters husband, while he died. My sister was lonely and miserable and wrote long letters to me, two or three times a week. She told me all about this marvellous friend of her dying husbands, of this friends kindness and patience and lovingkindness, and so on. She told me all about him, his early life, his struggles, his education everything. In short, I knew everything about him and he knew everything about me, because there seemed no particular reason why we should ever meet. We were to each other more like characters in a long-running serial story, but the story is being written as one reads. We knew the most intimate things about each other. It was not the first time nor the last that I have had this relationship with people I havent met. But now of course I wonder if this extraordinary intimacy at second hand means that one day we are bound to meet. Well, one day at a party I was next to an American I had never met, and yet who seemed familiar. I had not caught his name when introduced. And he felt the same about me. We started telling each other things we knew about each other, as a joke, withholding our names. We knew each other extremely well we knew more about each other than many who meet every day of their lives. Well, at last we came out with our names, and all was explained. The beginning of a beautiful friendship? Not then, at any rate. He was just off to a dig in Turkey, I was to take one of my children for a holiday, our lives were in very different grooves. We joked that there was no point in our being friends, because we already knew everything there was to know, and there could be no surprises. After that we kept running into each other, in the street, at friends houses. Of course, he was often abroad, and when my children were half grown, we would take them travelling. Before we left on a trip I would jokingly make a bet with my husband that we would run into Frederick somewhere. We did, more than once. When we met, one or other would say: And now tell me about yourself. More often than not, we already knew mutual friends had kept the serial story running.
This time, when he reached where I stood, he turned and looked in at the court but it is too big to be called a court where tiny people hurried away from the great building. He must have seen what I was seeing, because he said: There are buildings as large as that one which have flights of steps to them in scale with their size.
I didnt understand.
Theres a building in Peru for instance. It has stairways which could not be used by our size of human being. Imagine that building there with steps up to it in scale steps the height of a man. The reason why that building dwarfs us so, is because of the proportions of the steps and the building itself. It is in the proportions.
But it would be a building for giants, I said.
He quoted, laughing: But there were giants in those days.
I was getting very cold by now, and I was late for a visit I was making. As I thought this, he said, Well, I expect well run into each other again.
I had already said good-bye and turned away when I had to return. It was like a panic, a warning, a sense of possibilities being lost, of vanishing opportunities. Into my mind had come the memory of your talking on that dreary platform. Frederick had also turned back after having walked away a few steps.
He said: I spent last summer working on a site in Turkey. About half an acre of a city has been exposed. It must have been some miles across. It looks as if under the top level are many other levels. Human beings have lived on that site for many thousands of years. Probably the climate has changed in that time, changing everything, vegetation, animals, people. Based on a summers work and that exposed half acre we know everything about that civilisation its beliefs, its rituals, its habits, its agriculture. Learned papers are being written by the dozen. Ive written three myself. Yesterday I did not feel very well and I stayed at home and watched television between the hours of four and seven. Based on that experience I am prepared to conclude the following about civilisation in Britain in 1969. First of all, the most outstanding characteristic of an extraordinary civilisation: all events are equally important, whether war, a game, the weather, the craft of plant-growing, a fashion show, a police hunt.
Another, to us incredible trait, is their ability to accommodate such a wide variety of incompatible beliefs. They are a highly developed technical society, but they also believe in witches, fairies, supermen, magic of all kinds, and they take pains to inculcate these beliefs in their children side by side with scientific techniques.