4

With the following gentle scene I propose to conclude this autobiography. I had been wheeled into the rose-twined gallery for Special Convalescents in the second and last of my hospitals. You were reclining in a lounge chair beside me, in much the same attitude in which I had left you on June 15, at Gandora. You complained gaily that a woman in the room next to yours on the ground floor of the annex had a phonograph playing bird-call records, by means of which she hoped to make the mockingbirds of the hospital park imitate the nightingales and thrushes of her place in Devon or Dorset. You knew very well I wished to find out something. We both hedged. I drew your attention to the beauty of the climbing roses. You said: “Everything is beautiful against the sky (na fone neba)” and apologized for the “aphorism.” At last, in the most casual of tones I asked how you had liked the fragment of Ardis I gave you to read just before taking the little walk from which I had returned only now, three weeks later, in Catapult, California.

You looked away. You considered the mauve mountains. You cleared your throat and bravely replied that you had not liked it at all.

Meaning she would not marry a madman?

Meaning she would marry a sane man who could tell the difference between time and space.

Explain.

She was awfully eager to read the rest of the manuscript, but that fragment ought to be scrapped. It was written as nicely as everything I wrote but happened to be marred by a fatal philosophical flaw.

Young, graceful, tremendously charming, hopelessly homely Mary Middle came to say I would have to be back when the bell tinkled for tea. In five minutes. Another nurse signaled to her from the sun-striped end of the gallery, and she fluttered away.

The place (you said) was full of dying American bankers and perfectly healthy Englishmen. I had described a person in the act of imagining his recent evening stroll. A stroll from point H (Home, Hotel) to point P (Parapet, Pinewood). Imagining fluently the sequence of wayside events—child swinging in villa garden, lawn sprinkler rotating, dog chasing a wet ball. The narrator reaches point P in his mind, stops—and is puzzled and upset (quite unreasonably as we shall see) by being unable to execute mentally the about-face that would turn direction HP into direction PH.

“His mistake,” she continued, “his morbid mistake is quite simple. He has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means time. His impressions along the HP route (dog overtakes ball, car pulls up at next villa) refer to a series of time events, and not to blocks of painted space that a child can rearrange in any old way. It has taken him time—even if only a few moments—to cover distance HP in thought. By the time he reaches P he has accumulated duration, he is saddled with it! Why then is it so extraordinary that he cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible. Reverse motion is used in films only for comic effects—the resurrection of a smashed bottle of beer—

“Or rum,” I put in, and here the bell tinkled.

“That’s all very well,” I said, as I groped for the levers of my wheelchair, and you helped me to roll back to my room. “And I’m grateful, I’m touched, I’m cured! Your explanation, however, is merely an exquisite quibble—and you know it; but never mind, the notion of trying to twirl time is a trouvaille; it resembles (kissing the hand resting on my sleeve) the neat formula a physicist finds to keep people happy until (yawning, crawling back into bed) until the next chap snatches the chalk. I had been promised some rum with my tea—Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away)—”