Theatre of Life

This evening a thin fog puts a halo around the streetlamps, and I see that they are different colours, in shades from lemon to orange. A car with bluish headlamps swishes past, leaving a tangible quietness in its wake, whilst I stand under a streetlamp, letting my own footsteps relapse into a special kind of silence. Perhaps this is what theologians call “the ground of being”. More simply, I see it as what is left when the traffic noise stops.

There’s a fish and chip shop on the corner, The Neptune, as its illuminated sign announces to the world. Its plate-glass windows spill out light. I see uniformed assistants behind the counter and two customers waiting. I’m a front-row spectator at a play, the only show in town. This fog is a sea of primeval nothingness, the fast-food shop a last remnant of humanity, as if the species faces imminent extinction. Shall I go in and join them? No, I am not hungry.

Before this, I’d heard through the fog the raised voices of adults, and the anguished cries of a child. Then I’d turned a corner and reached the source, a brightly-lit cube, like the fish and chip shop but open to the cold night on two sides: a tyre-fitting workshop. The child’s cry I’d heard, so insistently repeated, was the squeak of a hydraulic jack which one of the young men was pumping with his foot, to lift the corner of a car. There were four altogether, speaking English; but I didn’t make sense of their conversation.

I had gone out to buy spinach and garlic, from Thara Stores, but now my errand was complete. I returned via the tyre workshop, for a second shot at understanding what passions caused them to disturb the night. On the way I reflected about my own life. “All I live for is feelings, this kind of meditation on the world, to see what it has to tell me, not via my intellect, but some special kind of listening and looking and smelling and touching. What can I call it, but feeling? When I am in this mood, every part of my life that has not been dedicated to this—perhaps I ought to call it tuning—seems a distraction, a kind of exile.”

It’s all still happening at the workshop: tyres being fitted, the phone ringing, the young men’s conversation still loud and animated. Again I’m in the front row at the brightly-lit Theatre of Life. What are they talking about? Just tyres, and the fitting thereof!

It reminds me of something, I don’t know why: an incident I reported in a blog post three years ago, when I was walking on a footpath. It was quite narrow and bordered by high hedges, of laurel, holly and other evergreen shrubs, in front of other trees stripped bare by the late autumn winds. The path led to a footbridge over a busy road. It was the excited chattering of the birds that made the big impression on me that time. What were they talking about? Were they preparing to migrate south before the winter really set in?

I had the sense that I might not have adequately conveyed my feelings in that blog post. Might I be able to add a clarifying footnote now? So I looked it up: “The Human Condition (2)”. The bit about the chattering birds is covered in two sentences:

Later as I went walking, some half-denuded shrubs were full of birds chirping and hopping excitedly from branch to branch. I don’t know what species, but there was a white flash on their wings.

I still don’t know how to convey the feeling.