I am writing two things now 1.

a short novel about a

man who liked little girls--and it's going to be called The
Kingdom by the Sea--and 2. a new type of
autobiography--a scientific attempt to unravel and trace
back all the tangled threads of one's personality--and the
provisional title is The Person in Question.

In probing my childhood (which is the next best to

probing ones eternity) I see the awakening of
consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the
intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright
blocks of perception are formed, aording memory a
slippery hold.

This slow, somewhat somnambulistic ascension in selfengendered darkness held obvious delights. The keenest
of them was not knowing when the last step would come.
At the top of the stairs, ones foot would be lifted to the
deceptive call of Step, and then, with a momentary sense
of exquisite panic, with a wild contraction of muscles,
would sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were,
with the infinitely elastic stu of its own nonexistence.

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a

raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf,
caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of
quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre
vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved
leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to
happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a
fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at
once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for
when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly
start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the
recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering
resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when
for a moment heart and leaf had been one.

As I crawl over those rocks, I keep repeating a kind of

zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the
English word childhood, which sounds mysterious and
new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed
up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin
Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods
of old hunchbacked fairies.

From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west
windows a marvellous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure
of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed,
gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his
handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the
mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion,
and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he
would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against
the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisal
personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their
garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the
wax tapers in mortal hands light up to wake a swarm of minute flames in
the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral
lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among swimming lights, in
the open con.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells

us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between
two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical
twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more
calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five
hundred heartbeats an hour).

LIVE IN THE NOW

I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made

to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too
tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of
reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I
kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me - flies back to
me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, bluewindowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past.

TREASURE OTHERS

How small the cosmos (a kangaroos pouch would hold it),

how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness,
to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!