Another rainy summer evening, so that the rain seems to dust away and reveal the underlying in all its monomaniacal muteness, without varnish or light. Everything outside a house seems antique; the houses themselves are barley-cane grandfather clocks, while the road is simply a well-trodden Iranian carpet. Inside a house, on the contrary, every fitment is a joke, and the ornaments lining the mantelpieces the unimaginative workings of a child's first story. Walking through the rain, it is as if everything separately bears witness not only to its true form, but to its true relation. Each branch hangs at its characteristic angle; the shadows agree wordlessly upon their areas of influence and onus of subjection; the set and spin of so much as a leaf is well rehearsed, and the gusty newspapers are vivid upon silent reins.
How subtly different on the rainy day that follows, when the world seems not sleeping but defunct, not forgotten but irrelevant. The bridges on the river droop, bereft of purpose, sustained only by a stony hand-clasp above the waters. The very idea of a bridge is an idle construct, conceived for a world whose bobbing gods have since departed, taking with them all relevance, all brilliance, all necessity. And even where an actual boat has taken it upon itself to exist, in order to rebut this bleak prognostication, the affair is a sham: it drifts disconsolately half in and out the water, as though governed by some ill-conceived physical law.
How to unite the two? Who cares, who knows? Just what should one care about, anyway? And does one have anything to add to all the things that have already been thought? These are just some of the things one thinks about as one walk between different places in the rain.
Posted by: |