A Journey

Time to get lyrical.

Last night, as I returned home after shopping after work, the light was beginning to change and I forbore my customary read to observe the way from the bus. It had been a wonderful cusp-of-the-season evening that had even suffused the quotidian and guilt-ridden act of supermarket shopping with the apricot luminance of the westering sun.

Now, as we headed into open countryside, the eastern sky had turned that full and limpid shade of thick grey-blue that only occurs on such evenings. The farm buildings captured the remains of the salmon-grey light and coruscated almost painfully to the eye. Thoughts and feelings seemed to float, easily juxtaposed without conflict. We passed the lay-by where, early on a perfect May morning last year, returning from a disastrous night's clubbing, I had sadly observed my friend needing his next fix of crack, unable to drive the remaining four miles without, and where, in a pointless gesture of solidarity, I grimly took my own.

But the bus had moved on: a village pub, so welcoming with its outside coloured lights, and further yet, a young man of ordinary appearance caught the bus and sat down gratefully. Something within me seemed to try to reach out and get into his head, to be him and understand his current hopes and fears. Another running for the bus, between stops, and parting from his girl at the same time. The driver, mock-angry, "Come on, I haven't got all night", but he stopped anyway. The blue light in the bus echoed more brightly the intensifying colour of the sky outside.

By the time I alighted, the darkness was beginning to assert itself, but the walk down the lane continued the magick. My soul was brim-full-to-bursting, and if correctly struck would have, as Douglas Adams so aptly described, "chimed". The final words of Umberto Eco's 'Foucault's Pendulum', as the narrator sits at the window of a Piemontese farmhouse watching the dawn light, awaiting his fate, recurred with a particular resonance: "It's so beautiful."

Then the comfort of reaching home on such an evening, the welcoming light of inside.

* * * * * * *

It was amazing too, this morning: the sky a ridge-and-furrow of pink and pale turquoise, the feeling of magick, never quite absent since last night, returning in a glorious refrain.

Proust would have made a long and exquisite vintage of all this; I have attempted an alchemical distillation of the experiential to a shot of verbose eau-de-vie. We should all treasure such moments, such journeys of our consciousness guided by the phenomenal, the merely contingent: there are few enough in a lifetime.