In the suburbs of Athens, he walked a street that led to an intersection where he encountered the large, block-like houses typical of his childhood walks; old, plaster-faced buildings, with blue or cream or yellow-ochre paintwork that had darkened with age.
His attention was drawn from the clusters of houses along the hill back to the expanse of the sea, and then to a solitary figure on the hill, or a herd of goats (their bells jangling in the distance), before the sea claimed his attention once more. The light was intense; scintillations seemed to etch or burn themselves into the space of his vision.
– Writing stories, I said, is rather like acting. It’s an involvement in an unreal world.
A white-painted room, the white discoloured and scratched. Heavy green curtains. Prints on the walls: Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with its monstrous Hell panel; a little painting of Dante and Beatrice meeting in a tiny garden, painted simply, almost naively, with an innocent wonder in the faces, and the gazes which meet.
One morning he saw her coatless and bareheaded in the rain, and thought, yes, that is how she is.
He found himself looking out for her; sometimes stopping to wonder why she had so taken hold of his mind. Chance had brought her into the proximity of death; yet in the face of this she was stubbornly beautiful – not, he thought, in the sense that she was possessed by mere wilfulness, nor any desperate clinging, but rather that in her countenance there was a firmness, a resistance integral to whatever was refulgent and vital in her being.
He copied into a notebook the words: “The blind spirit rises towards the truth by way of what is material, and seeing the light, it is resuscitated from its former submersion”; adding his own comment: “And what speaks through persons – in their entire being – enlightens me.”
In the morning, on the way to work, Ran would often pass a tall and frail-looking young woman, walking slowly with the aid of a stick; her hair long and blond and hanging in curling strands. He thought (whether correctly or not) that she had some form of blood-disease.
Sometimes he would see her unexpectedly in the street, as he turned a corner, and it always had the effect of a shock; in the way that the sight of someone you love, or a powerful work of art, or anything epiphanic, may jolt and disrupt your state of being. Her affliction drew his compassion; her beauty drew his admiration; and the two things fused into this intense and painful emotion that could make him recoil, as if he had been struck.
One morning he saw her coatless and bareheaded in the rain, and thought, yes, that is how she is.
In imagination: sitting in a public square, with fountains, pigeons, a stream of people. Of each passer-by she asked me, What would you think of that one?
Black railings patterned with rust and with splotches and threads of light blue paint. Steps, stone, down to basement dwellings. Rotten leaves, papers, other trash on steps or beside, unremoved.
A shadow life. And that is dangerous.
– Would you want to know him? Does she attract you?
I couldn’t bear the sound of their voices any longer.
I was beginning to cry. The only direction available was that leading back to the house, and I took it.
Having taken refuge in the room upstairs, the voices of the girl and her friends, the couple we were staying with and their other guest, penetrated that refuge and gave me no peace.
Precise red leaves. Stones. Blue flame. Window.
In the morning: through the morning: and into the afternoon: sparrows come into the kitchen through the window; noise of wings, of feet scrabbling on surfaces (table, floor).
Two people: walking in a field, looking for a path in vain, then taking the main road a long way.
One morning he saw her coatless and bareheaded in the rain, and thought, yes, that is how she is.
David Miller
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