Mais il suffisait que, dans mon lit même, mon sommeil fût profond et détendît entièrement mon esprit; alors celui-ci lâchait le plan du lieu où je m'étais endormi, et quand je m'éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j'ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j'étais; j'avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l'existence comme il peut frémir au fond d'un animal; j'étais plus dénué que l'homme des cavernes; mais alors le souvenir -- non encore du lieu où j'étais, mais de quelques-uns de ceux que j'avais habitees et où j'aurais pu être -- venait à moi comme un secours d'en haut pour me tirer du néant d'où je n'aurais pu sortir tout seul; je passais en une seconde par-dessus des siècles de civilisation, et l'image confusément entrevue de lampes à pétrole, puis de chemises à col rabattu, recomposaient peu à peu les traits originaux de mon moi.

I remember well the day in February when Yana came home from work and said, "That's it. We're leaving. I've had it." I tried to argue. I talked about the Motherland, about God, about the benefits of enduring intense social pressure, about the linguistic and cultural range available to us. I even spoke of birch trees, something for which I will never forgive myself.

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke.
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -

I was never cool in school, I'm sure you don't remember me,
--Who the fuck are you? (laughter)
And now it's been ten years, I'm still wonderin' who to be...
But I'd love to mix in circles, cliques, and social coteries, that's me [...]

Who's got the looks? Who's got the brains? Who's got everything?
I've got this pain in my heart, that's all...

It's raining hard, and it looks as though the poppies in the garden are being attacked.  I realize now that this house has been the starting point for everything I've ever dreamed up, because my grandparents' house and their life in that house for 56 years stands for a separate and yet central world of ordinariness.

The train journey from Sheffield to Machester to Glasgow was a strange one.  The first thing I noticed, in both England and Scotland, was that the clouds are much closer to the ground in this part of the world.  So much closer that the world seems smaller.  The skyline is lower, and the clouds dominate everything you can see - huge, churned up, folds and folds of them, impenetrable in one place and breaking up like carded wool in another.  They look like you could put your fingers between them.  I saw two flashes of lightning over a businessman's shoulder.  Then, during the drive to Lanark, where my grandparents live, I recognized place names: Carluke, Carnwath, Peebles.

From my favourite book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark:

One day when they were alone, Sandy told Teddy Lloyd that all his portraits, even that of the littlest Lloyd baby, were now turning out to be likenesses of Miss Brodie, and she gave him her insolent blackmailing stare.  He kissed her as he had done three years before when she was fifteen, and for the best part of five weeks of the summer they had a love affair in the empty house, only sometimes answering the door to Rose, but at other times letting the bell scream on.

During that time he painted a little, and she said: 'You are still making me look like Jean Brodie.'  So he started a new canvas, but it was the same again.

She said: 'Why are you obsessed with that woman?  Can't you see she's ridiculous?'

He said, yes, he could see Jean Brodie was ridiculous.  He said, would she kindly stop analysing his mind, it was unnatural in a girl of eighteen.

LVIII: The Treaty

It happened that, one Monday, as I was going back to the seminary, I saw a lady fall down in the street. My first reaction, in such a case, ought to have been of pity or laughter; it was neither one thing or the other, because -- and this is what I would have liked to tell in Latin -- because the lady was wearing very well-washed stockings, and she didn't dirty them, and had silk garters, and didn't lose them. Several people went to help her, but they had no opportunity to lift her from the ground; she got up very annoyed, dusted herself off, thanked them, and disappeared down the next street.

"This fashion for imitating the French girls on the Rua do Ouvidor," said José Dias to me, as he walked along and commented on the fall, "is obviously wrong.  Our girls should walk as they always did, slowly and leisurely, not with this Frenchified tick-tack, tick-tack..."

I hardly heard him. The lady's stockings and garters whitened and curled around in front of me, then walked on, fell, got up, and went away. When we got to the corner, I looked down the street, and saw our unfortunate lady in the dstance, going at the same pace, tick-tack, tick-tack...

"It doesn't look as if she hurt herself," I said.

"So much the better for her, but she must have scratched her knees; it's nothing more than a fad, scurring around like that..."

I think he said "fad"; I stopped at the "scratched knees." From that moment, until I got to the seminary, I didn't see a woman in the street that I didn't want to fall; some I guessed were wearing their stockings well stretched, with tight garters... Maybe there were some who weren't even wearing stockings... But I saw them with them on... Or... It's also possible...

I intersperse this will ellipses, to give an idea of my thoughts, which were diffuse and confused in just this manner; but I am probably not conveying what I mean. My head was hot, and I felt unsteady on my feet. In the seminary, the first hour was unbearable. The cassocks began to look like skirts, and brought back the lady's fall. It was no longer just one that fell; every one I met in the street now showed me her blue garters in a flash: they were blue. At night, I dreamt of them. A multitude of abominable creatures started walking around me, tick-tack, tick-tack... They were beautiful, some slim, others plump, and all of them as agile as the devil. I woke up, and tried to drive them away with curses and other methods, but as soon as I went back to sleep they came back, and hand in hand around me, they made a vast circle of skirts, or, mounted in the air, rained legs and feet on my head. It went on like this till dawn. I could sleep no longer, and prayed paternosters, ave marias and credos. Since this book is the unvarnished truth, I have to confess that I had to interrupt my prayers to accompany a faraway figure, tick-tack, tick-tack... I hurriedly went back to my prayer, always picking it up in the middle to get it right, as if there had been no interruption, but no doubt I didn't start where I had left off.

Since the evil continued into the early morning, I tried to defeat it, but in such a way that I wouldn't lose it altogether. Wise men of the Scriptures, divine what I did. This was the answer: since I could not turn these images away from me, I had recourse to a treaty between my conscience and my imagination. These female visions would from now on be thought of as simple incarnations of the vices, and for that very reason susceptible of contemplation, as the best way of tempering the character and of arming it for the harsh struggles of life. I didn't formulate this in words, nor was it necessary to do so; the contract was made tacitly, with some repugnance, but it was made. And for some days, it was I myself who called up these visions to strengthen myself, and did not reject them until they themselves went away exhausted.