In the first hour of the morning after the first morning to have been mentioned in this story, the man was sitting in the dining area mentioned previously and reading the book mentioned previously when his son arrived home from the factory where he worked. Among the pages that the man had read from the book just mentioned during the hours just mentioned were pages 159 and 160, where the following words are printed inside quotation marks: a greater amount of urgent and pressing destitution … than in any other part of Ireland I have visited, as in addition to want of food which exists to as great an extent as in any other part of Ireland, want of shelter from the inclemency of the seasons exists to a far greater extent … vast numbers of families have been unhoused and their houses destroyed. You cannot admit them to the workhouse, there is no room; you cannot give them outdoor relief, they have no houses … their cries may be heard all night in the streets of this town; and since my arrival here I have constantly been obliged to procure shelter in the stables in the neighbourhood for persons I have found perishing in the streets at 12 o’clock at night. While the son was taking out of the oven mentioned previously the meal that his mother had left for him, which was a plate of chops and rice, he told his father the first of the details in the following paragraph. After the son had eaten the meal just mentioned, he told his father the remainder of the following details just mentioned.
The son had noticed late on the previous afternoon that the metal objects leaving his workmate’s machine had been wrongly finished. The son had then left his own machine and had offered to help his workmate check the settings on his machine and to put again through the machine the objects that had been wrongly finished. The workmate had agreed with the son that the objects leaving his, the workmate’s, machine had been wrongly finished, but the workmate had not agreed to let the son check the settings on the machine. The workmate had said that he himself had checked the settings earlier in the afternoon. The workmate had then said that the machine itself was at fault. The workmate had then walked away from his machine and had lit a cigarette and had begun to smoke the cigarette.
After the son had taken out of the oven mentioned previously the plate of chops and rice mentioned previously, he first carried the plate and the chops and the rice to the bench between the kitchen and the dining area, then carried back to the oven door the tea-towel that he had used to protect his hands from the heated plate, then took out a knife and a fork from the drawer of cutlery in the kitchen, then put the knife on one side and the fork on the other side of the plate of chops and rice, then took out from the food cupboard in the kitchen a salt shaker and a pepper mill and a bottle of sauce with the word Cornwell and the words Father’s Favourite on the label, and then shook salt from the cellar and ground out pepper from the mill over the chops on his plate. During some of the time while the son did the things just mentioned, he was facing in a direction such that his father could have seen his face if he, the father, had looked up from where he was sitting with the book named previously open in front of him, but the father did not look up.
During the first hour of each of the three mornings following the morning most recently mentioned, the father was sitting in the position mentioned previously with the book named previously open in front of him when the son returned from the factory where he worked. On the first two of the mornings just mentioned, the father waited for the son to speak while he took his meal from the oven mentioned previously and again after he had eaten his meal, but the son did not speak. On the third of the mornings just mentioned, while the son was taking out of the oven just mentioned the plate of curry and rice that his mother had left for him he told his father that the workmate who had been in danger of being dismissed had not been at his machine when the workers on the evening shift had begun work on the previous afternoon; that he, the son, had asked the foreman of the evening shift where the workmate was; that the foreman had answered that the workmate had been dismissed; that the son had then asked what the workmate had said after he had been told that he had been dismissed; that the foreman had then said that no one had told the workmate that he had been dismissed and that the management of the factory dismissed a person by employing a courier to take to the address of the person a letter telling the person that he or she had been dismissed and a sum of money equal to his or her pay for two weeks plus any money owing to the person for leave not taken. During some of the time while the son told the father what is reported in the previous sentence, the son was facing in a direction such that the father could have seen the son’s face if he, the father, had looked up from where he was sitting with the book named previously in front of him, but the father did not look up.
During the second hour of the morning most recently mentioned, while the man was lying in his and his wife’s bed beside his wife, who was asleep, and while the man was waiting to fall asleep, he saw in his mind a scene in a house that was furnished with only a few pieces of furniture. In the scene just mentioned, a man one year older than the man in whose mind the scene appeared was sitting at a table in the kitchen of the house and smoking a cigarette while the wife and the son and the daughter of the man were sitting in the adjoining lounge-room and watching a television set that was in faulty order. The man who saw the scene just mentioned in his mind did not look in the direction of the face of any of the persons in the scene.
During the hour mentioned in the previous paragraph, whenever the man saw in his mind the scene mentioned in that paragraph he told himself that the scene was in his mind and not in the place that was called by many persons the real world. During the hour just mentioned, the man told himself further that the scene in his mind was of the kind of scene that appeared in his mind while he read from a book of fiction or even from the kind of book that reported events believed to have happened or even agreed to have happened in the place that was called by many persons the real world.
During the first hour of the day following the day mentioned in the previous paragraph, the man was sitting in the dining area mentioned previously with the book named previously open in front of him when his son arrived home from the factory where he worked. When the son walked into the kitchen of his parents’ house during the hour just mentioned, the father greeted the son but did not look up from the book named previously. After the father had greeted the son as mentioned in the previous sentence, the son greeted the father and then took out of the oven mentioned previously the plate of chicken and rice that had been left for him by his mother and then prepared to eat the meal.
On a certain day in the year when the son was aged five years and had recently begun to go to school and when the father and the son were alone together in the dining area mentioned previously, the father began to tell the son what was likely to happen to him in the future. The son would go to secondary school for six years. Then, so the father said, the son would go to a university and would learn there to be a scientist or an engineer. Then, so the father said, the son would work for five days of each week as a scientist or an engineer. The son would be paid much money for his work, so the father then said, and he, the son, would use some of the money to buy a motor car and a house and furniture and books and a television set. At some time in the future, so the father then said, the son would marry, and at some time afterwards he would become the father of a son and a daughter. Late on a certain evening after he, the son, had been living for many years in his house with his wife and his son and his daughter and his furniture and his books and his television set and with his motor car and his wife’s motor car in a garage beside the house, so the father said, a visitor would arrive at the son’s house. The visitor would knock at the front door of the house, so the father then said, and the son would open the door and would see an old man standing in front of him. The old man would be wearing shabby clothes, so the father then said, and he would say while he stood at the front door that he owned no house or furniture or television set or motor car and that he had no money in his pockets. The old man would then ask, so the father
then said, whether he, the old man, might take shelter for the night in his, the son’s, house. The son would then look at the face of the old man, so the father then said, and would discover that the old man was his father.
After the father had told his son what is reported in the previous paragraph, the father asked his son what he would say or do after the old man had asked for shelter. The son then said that he would invite his father to come into his, the son’s, house and to rest on his, the son’s, furniture.
While the son said what is reported in the previous paragraph, the father looked at the son’s face. The father then put an arm around the shoulders of his son and said that the scene that he, the father, had been describing was only a scene in a story told by the father.
In the house where the father lived when he was aged from five to seven years, his mother would sometimes ask him whether he would like to hear the poem “Boy Blue.” The mother would ask the question just mentioned most often in the late afternoon of a cloudy and windy day, when she had not yet turned on the light in the kitchen of the house just mentioned and when the wind was rattling the windowpanes and the loose weatherboards of the house. Whenever the mother had asked the question just mentioned, the boy would answer that he wanted to hear the poem. The mother, who had stopped going to school when she was twelve years of age, would first recite the words Little Boy Blue, by Eugene Field and would then recite from memory all six stanzas of a poem that she had learned when she was eight years of age from the Third Book of the Victorian Readers, published by the Education Department of Victoria.
While the mother recited the poem mentioned in the previous paragraph, her son, the person referred to elsewhere in this story as the man or the father, saw in his mind an image of a room containing a chair on which was a toy dog covered with dust and a toy soldier red with rust, each of which, the toy dog and the toy soldier, was wondering as he waited the long years through what had become of the person known as Little Boy Blue since he had kissed them and put them there and had told them to wait until he came and to make no noise. While the father saw in his mind the image of the room just mentioned, he pretended that the room was not part of an image in the invisible place that he often called his mind but a room in the place that he and others called the real world. The father as a boy pretended that the room in his mind was a room in the place called the real world so that he could further pretend that a person who lived in the place just mentioned would come into the room at some time in the future and would explain to the dog and the soldier mentioned previously why they had to wait and to wonder for so long and so that he could further pretend that he would never again begin to weep while his mother read the poem and would never again pretend to be comforted after his mother had read to the end of the poem and had then looked at his face and had then told him that the dog and the soldier and the room where they were waiting were only details in a story.
Emerald Blue
In the Gippsland Forest
For most of his lifetime, he had kept in his mind certain details from pictures he had seen, but he had hardly ever been interested in art. He had never gone voluntarily into an art gallery and he felt no regret that he had never seen the art of Europe. One day when he was aged more than forty and was walking past the National Gallery of Victoria, he asked himself what images, if any, he could call to mind from the few occasions when he had been obliged to accompany someone through that building. He recalled two images: a distant view of a winding river in a painting called, so he thought, Still Flows the Stream and Shall For Ever Flow, by an Australian painter whose name he had never learned; and in the foreground of a crowded painting called, so he believed, Cleopatra’s Banquet, a dog resembling one of the whippets that had contested a race reserved for their kind on each of the weekly programmes of races for greyhounds at the track called Napier Park, which had been covered over for nearly thirty years by certain streets of houses in the suburb of Strathmore in the north-west of Melbourne.
In his last year at secondary school, some of his teachers had told him that he should go to university. At the end of that year he passed the matriculation examination, but then he joined the state public service as a clerical officer of a lowly grade. He was afraid of the university. He had looked into the handbook for the faculty of arts—the only faculty he was qualified for—and had been repelled by the lists of books to be read. He did not want to read the same books that were read and discussed by all the other students and by the lecturers and tutors. There was much that he wanted to learn, but he could not believe that he would learn it as other people learned what they learned. He believed in something that he called to himself precious knowledge. As a child, he had hoped to find some of that knowledge in some discarded or forgotten book. Later, he came to understand that such knowledge as he was looking for was not readily passed from one person to another. Sometimes he thought of precious knowledge as lying on the other side of the pages of one or another book whose title and author he had yet to hear of. In order to obtain the precious knowledge, he would have had to get inside the book itself and to live in the places where the characters lived. Looking out from those places, he would see such things (knowledge being to him always something visible) as only the characters in the book were privileged to see, whereas readers and even the author of the book could only speculate about them.
In the first year after he left school, he bought and began to read many blue-and-white-covered Pelican books: histories of places and periods not studied at the University of Melbourne; summaries of the works of certain philosophers; books of popular psychology. At some time during that year, he bought the Pelican book Landscape into Art, by Kenneth Clark, first published in 1949 and published as a Pelican Book in 1956. If the title had been The Art of the Landscape or Landscape as Art, he might not have bought the book, but he was taken by the force of the preposition into. The phrase landscape into art seemed to promise him precious knowledge. He was going to see, perhaps, into the mind of some man who had landscapes passing through him. Green fields and blue or grey skies drifted into him from the one side; mysterious things happened in the depths of him; and then a painted landscape of vistas and perspectives drifted out of the other side of him.
Before he had begun to read the text of Landscape into Art, he looked at the series of black and white illustrations in the middle pages. Of the landscapes or details of landscapes reproduced in those pages, one image lodged in his mind and was never afterwards dislodged. More than thirty years later, he could still see in his mind an image of certain ruts filled with water beside a road in the painted landscape February Fill Dyke, by B. W. Leader, whereas he could remember no detail of any of the other illustrations in Landscape into Art. The first pages that he read in the book were the pages listed in the index beside the entry Leader, B. W. He learned from these pages that the painting that had so impressed him had been included in the book only as an example of the least praiseworthy sort of painted landscape. February Fill Dyke was, according to Kenneth Clark, by far the worst painting of all those illustrated.
The image of the water-filled ruts had been in his mind for thirty-three years before he began to understand how that image had come to be there. He had never learned where or when the painter Leader had lived. He had never read any other reference to Leader apart from the disparaging passage in Clark’s book. In the first few years after he had first taken the image of the ruts to heart, he regretted sometimes that he still knew nothing about the person who had painted the ruts or about the place where certain water-filled ruts beside a country road in England (if it was England) had been changed into a painted image of water-filled ruts. When he was aged in his twenties and thirties and keeping a journal with long entries explaining what he called his world-view, he would have said that the so-called original ruts and country road existed only in his imagination, while the real ruts and road existed only in the illustration that he had seen long ago in a book. In his fifties, he could have said no
more than that an endless series of images of water-filled ruts beside country roads existed in a part of himself. He had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind.
The image most often visible of the images of water-filled ruts, so he discovered one day in his early fifties, was connected with an image of a road in a picture called In the Gippsland Forest. All of the images just mentioned were connected also with certain images that he had seen more than forty years before the day just mentioned but had not seen since.
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