t happened next. They wanted to leave this house because
they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was
in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it
when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to
pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made
by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up,
but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say
for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought!
The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our
possessions we have--what an accidental affair this living is after all
our civilization--let me just count over a few of the things lost in one
lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of
losses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble--three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the
iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle
board, the hand organ--all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds,
they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is
to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit
surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to
compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the
Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single
hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!
Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying
back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the
rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so
haphazard....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the
cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red
light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here,
helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the
roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things,
that one