That was a long time ago. Such a moment cannot return. It is the moment which really closes that section of my life which I have been chronicling these past fourteen months. An absurd moment, but from it and by it I measure my recovery. Je vens d’lué.
It does not worry me now, as it worried me when I began this book, that at the age of forty I should find myself at the end of my active life. I do not now think this is even true. I no longer yearn for ideal landscapes and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not strike me as loss. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself from one cycle of events. It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, householder and man of affairs, recluse.
My life has never been more physically limited than it has been during these last three years. Yet I feel that in this time I have cleared the decks, as it were, and prepared myself for fresh action. It will be the action of a free man. What this action will be I cannot say. I used to think of journalism; sometimes I used to think of a job with the UN. But these were attractive only to a harassed man. I might go into business again. Or I might spend the next ten years working on a history of the British Empire. I cannot say. Yet some fear of action remains. I do not wish to be re-engaged in that cycle from which I have freed myself. I fear to be continually washed up on this city.
Nine or ten months ago, when I was writing about my marriage and had written myself back into my aching love for Sandra, I used to ask myself what I would do if suddenly one day, from behind my pillar, I saw her enter the dining-room alone. I know of course what I would have done then: the question was no more than a wish. But now I find I have gone back to something closer to my original view. I once again see my marriage as an episode in parenthesis; I see all its emotions as, profoundly, fraudulent. So writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life.
I do not believe I exaggerate either about Sandra or my mood. Last Saturday there was much excitement in the hotel. We, through our lord and lady, were being honoured by the attendance of a young but distinguished financier at the local branch dinner of some international brotherhood. The dinner took place in one of the upper rooms reserved for wedding luncheons. We, staff and faithful in the dining-room, studied the guests as they were received and went up the stairs. Our guest of honour arrived, with his wife. Lady Stella. I pulled my face behind the pillar and studied Garbage bringing his two-pronged knife down on the struggling cheese. Dixi.
August 1964 — July 1966