Chapter 55
There is a dull rumble of tanks and the shooting
is settling down to a devil's tattoo. From the shore
there is a great roar developing, and you wonder if
maybe the Jap amphibious counter-offensive has been
mmmintercepted by the
Navy's guns. Planes are aloft again, veering full throttle and
swooping low to strafe the enemy craft approaching the beach.
Blood from the wound in your side still seeps through
your clothing and dampens the earth, but the pain has
numbed itself and you are able to observe your body
with vague disinterest, like a poor substitute for a mother.
Darkness seems to be crawling all around you and little
gusts of heat tumble over the ground and the trees
are jibbering with flecked mouths of green and space is
split with trembling. There is a climactic staccato of rifles
from below and the noise of running through underbrush and
the exultant shouts of pursuit. Your brain tries to attract
your attention, tugging at the sleeves of your senses to
say that the enemy has broken from his positions and
is retreating along the base of the hill. But your
spirit merely nods with a weary indifference and tells it
that you are tired of men and their petty problems
and their writhing efforts to survive and the frail flesh
and its tenuous hold on perpetuity. You want to be
alone in this penultimate solitude, this last but one, and
take the stopper out of memory and let it spill.
This is the summing up, the thumbing over, the sorting
out, the placing together in neat piles what is in
the mind and what is in the heart. To everything
there is a season. A time to be born and
a time to die. A time to embrace and a
time to refrain from embracing. A time for war and
a time for peace. So be it. So be it.
You were arbitrarily placed between the rigid brackets of birth
and death, and in between you grow and develop and
you go from one end of it to the other
without being able to turn back and retrace your footsteps.
You never felt strange about being alive, about finding yourself
equipped with arms and legs and physical functions, about
mmmseeing
things, recognizing colors, feeling heat and cold, touching
mmmobjects, experiencing
events. Maybe it was a little odd and uncomfortable in
the beginning, but when you stopped being curious it all
righted itself and seemed proper and normal. And yet, there
was something held apart from you, as though you had
outlived the period for which you were born too soon,
and you didn't really belong, and that any minute someone
could be expected to tap you on the shoulder and
ask to see your printed invitation. And so, because you
had crashed the gate and been absorbed in the crowd,
you could never bring yourself to believe in your own
essentialness, and you became a spectator and watched
mmmthings happen
to others and watched them happen to yourself. And people
thought you were rather dull and lazy, if they noticed
you at all, and said that you didn't give a
damn about what was important and that you would probably
be a failure. And they couldn't seem to understand that
you really weren't trying to be anything in particular, that
you were just a bystander, an eavesdropper, a miscellaneous
mmmindividual
who didn't talk much but who was able to
observe a good deal because he always sat in corners.
You matured because you gave all your time to it.
* * *
