inscribed in stone that there is but one God and thou shalt have no other. But thou shouldst have stuck with us. We offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation, either; no afterlife in which to be bored for all eternity; no parousia, no day of reckoning and divine retribution, no kingdom of heaven on earth; nothing, in fact, except stories, comforting or at least comfortingly reasonable accounts of how and why things are as they are and by what means they may be maintained or even, on occasion, rare occasion, altered. If the wise man suffers it is due to a hidden flaw in him that we deplore, if the tyrant prospers it is because we admire his overweening and irresistible will. Why plague?—because your king is cursed. How shall your armies be victorious in battle?—place oxen and the odd virgin before our graven images and slit their throats. Sometimes we ask terrible things of you—think of Iphigenia, think of Iphigenia’s father—and often we give you nothing in return. It is our way of demonstrating to you the inscrutable action of Fate. Above all, we would have you acknowledge and accept that the nature of your lives is tragic, not because life is cruel or sad—what are sadness and cruelty to us?—but because it is as it is and Fate is unavoidable, and, above all, because you will die and be as though you had never been. That is the difference between us and your mealy-mouthed Saviour, so-called—we do not pretend to be benign, but are playful only, and endlessly diverted by the spectacle of your heart-searchings and travails of the spirit.
The little station when Adam arrives there is deserted, no station master, no porter, no waiting passengers. He is early, the train is not due for another fifteen minutes, and besides it is sure to be late, as it usually is. The station is by the river, miles from anywhere, not even attached to a village—why was it built here, at the desolate edge of a marsh? It must have been for the convenience of some grand house nearby that is now long gone. Adam thinks of the past piled up behind him, its countless overlapping layers, and of what will have been his own brief moment on this so tender, frail and suffering earth. He parks outside the ticket office and walks through to the platform unchallenged. The pair of tweed trousers he is wearing, which he found in the wardrobe in the Sky Room, have begun to chafe the inner sides of his thighs. What was he thinking, to put them on? It seemed the necessary thing, at the time. This is another mark of his inherent and humble piety, this sense he has of the sacramental in even the smallest, even the most absurd, of actions. Well, holy these trousers may be, but he suspects they are not clean: they have an unpleasant smell, at once stale and sharp. They are the wrong fit, being tight at the waist and short in the leg, like the pyjamas he wore last night. Still, small as they are on him they are too roomy to have been Pa’s, so whose, again, can they have been? He experiences a flash of anger. Is the house itself set on making a fool of him, getting him up in these laughable outfits and sending him stumbling into the world like a village idiot? But he knows it is not the house’s fault that he looks foolish: it is his own.
He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the
The little station when Adam arrives there is deserted, no station master, no porter, no waiting passengers. He is early, the train is not due for another fifteen minutes, and besides it is sure to be late, as it usually is. The station is by the river, miles from anywhere, not even attached to a village—why was it built here, at the desolate edge of a marsh? It must have been for the convenience of some grand house nearby that is now long gone. Adam thinks of the past piled up behind him, its countless overlapping layers, and of what will have been his own brief moment on this so tender, frail and suffering earth. He parks outside the ticket office and walks through to the platform unchallenged. The pair of tweed trousers he is wearing, which he found in the wardrobe in the Sky Room, have begun to chafe the inner sides of his thighs. What was he thinking, to put them on? It seemed the necessary thing, at the time. This is another mark of his inherent and humble piety, this sense he has of the sacramental in even the smallest, even the most absurd, of actions. Well, holy these trousers may be, but he suspects they are not clean: they have an unpleasant smell, at once stale and sharp. They are the wrong fit, being tight at the waist and short in the leg, like the pyjamas he wore last night. Still, small as they are on him they are too roomy to have been Pa’s, so whose, again, can they have been? He experiences a flash of anger. Is the house itself set on making a fool of him, getting him up in these laughable outfits and sending him stumbling into the world like a village idiot? But he knows it is not the house’s fault that he looks foolish: it is his own.
He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the
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