The Eve of Everything

Tomorrow was D-day. He sat at his escritoire, the same escritoire at which he had sat for nineteen years of examinations, submissions, auditions, and assorted ordeals, and found that he could not write. Could not read. Could not, with any conviction, perform even the simplest offices of a conscious human being. A flurry of nervousness had descended upon him without solicitation, without apology, and with every intention of remaining. It swam through his veins like a fluttering swordfish, all fin and frenzy and directionless urgency.

Wherefore, he enquired of himself, with the grim, circular persistence of a mind that has exhausted all productive avenues, does anticipation exceed, in its torments, the ordeal itself? He had observed this phenomenon across the whole of his adult life and had never satisfactorily resolved it. Tomorrow, whatever it delivered, would at least deliver it finitely. It would arrive, transpire, and thereafter recede into the fixed and manageable territory of the past. The past had the considerable virtue of being concluded. It could not surprise a man. It could wound him in recollection, certainly, but it could not ambush him. It had already spent itself. Tonight, however, was the province of the unresolved. And therein resided its singular cruelty.

This was his last opportunity. Not last in the melodramatic sense, but last in the arithmetical sense: the resources were exhausted, the extensions refused, and the sympathetic parties thereafter departed or grown weary of sympathy. What remained was tomorrow, and what tomorrow contained would constitute the remainder of his life.

He rose from the escritoire. He went to the window. Below, the street conducted its oblivious commerce: a woman with parcels, two boys disputing something of evident passion, a dog of magnificent indifference navigating the whole spectacle.

He returned to his chair. He waited, as men have always waited, for the morning to confirm what the evening already knew.

The Weight of the Steeple

She was a perfect steeple of propriety.

I say this not in admiration, though admiration is precisely what the rest offered her, in quantities so liberal and so unexamined as to constitute, in my private estimation, a form of intellectual abdication. When it came to rectitude, she towered over everyone, and everyone was grateful to be towered over. She knew the right moves to make with the precision of a chess master who had fully memorised not the game but the audience. She was everybody’s angel, and they did not go to bed without saying a prayer for her.

I alone, it seemed, found the steeple somewhat cold to shelter beneath.

Wherefore does virtue, when worn with such immaculate and undeviating consistency, begin to resemble its own performance? This was the question that had taken up residence in my conscience. I could not dismiss it. I had observed Mrs. Havercroft — for that was her name, spoken of always by neighbours with reverence — across seven years of proximate habitation, and I had therein witnessed a woman who had never, not once, been caught in the ungainly human act of not knowing what to do.

And that, I submit, is not virtue. That is its very accomplished understudy.

True goodness, where I have occasionally been privileged to observe it, is a halting and imperfect enterprise. It trips, and often reconsiders. It sits with its head in its hands on difficult afternoons and thereafter rises, imperfectly, to make the attempt again. It is recognisable precisely by its uncertainty. Mrs. Havercroft, by painful contrast, never weighed anything.

Last Thursday, I watched her deliver a basket at the corner, and watched her perform the gesture with such exquisite calibration of expression and timing that a small crowd thereafter gathered simply to observe their own gratitude reflected back at them. The man wept. Mrs. Havercroft received the tears with the gracious composure of one fully prepared for them.

I walked home in a disquiet I could not immediately name, and I have named it only since: the faint, vertiginous suspicion that a steeple, however perfect, is not built for the comfort of those beneath it. It is built, in the final and most honest accounting, to be seen from a considerable distance.

The Patience of Becoming

The sun rose, mist-wrapped, like a gigantic silkworm cocoon.

I had been awake to receive it, sitting on the low wall of the harbour, my thoughts in that loose, unanchored condition in which they are neither productive nor entirely at rest, but simply present. I had not slept well. I had not, if I am honest, slept well in several weeks. But I had come to the harbour thereafter, each grey morning, because something about the sea’s indifference to my difficulties I found, paradoxically, consoling.

The sun was sleepy. There is no more precise or honest word for it. It seemed to be still in bed, waiting, as my grandmother used to wait, propped upon three pillows with imperious patience, for someone to bring the morning drink. It yawned its way out of the sea wrapped in its quilt of mist, like a baby cosy in its fleecy papoose, reluctant and unhurried and magnificently unconcerned with the anxieties of those already abroad and shivering on harbour walls at an unreasonable hour.

I watched it and felt, for the first time in several weeks.

Wherefore, I have since reflected, do we reserve our most penetrating philosophical instruction for books and lecture halls and the grave pronouncements of the credentialed and the celebrated, when the sun, on any given November morning, is conducting a masterclass in the single doctrine most of us most urgently require and most consistently fail to absorb? The doctrine, I mean, of becoming at one’s own pace. Of emerging gradually, softly, and still half-wrapped in the materials of one’s own formation.

I had been requiring of myself, for the better part of these sleepless weeks, a fully-emerged persona. A man with his answers arranged, his purposes declared, and his light operating at full capacity and without any inconvenience. I had been treating my own uncertainty as a deficiency, rather than as the necessary and honourable condition of a thing still in the active process of becoming what it is.

The cocoon, I noted, does not apologise for being a cocoon.

The sun did not hurry. It rose as it rose, by increments. In the patient accumulation of its own warmth against the resistance of the morning, the mist did not so much disappear as gradually concede, withdrawing with the dignified reluctance of something that had served its purpose and knew it.

By seven o’clock, the harbour was gold.

I walked home. For the first time in some weeks, content to be still wrapped, warm, and, perhaps, becoming.