Lost and found

You found your hat, miraculously recovered after it spent a day on the rail tracks, below wind-swept clouds, rain and cold stars. Of course, things come and go and it took you forty minutes to think through this (a bit like Klingsor in Hesse: grit your teeth and it will pass, you'll be through).

You hopped on and off the trains haphazardly, not following the set ways, as if on the spur of the moment some great idea had struck me. At one station-I forget which-there was a terribly sad video image projected onto the curving wall. The image didn't flicker but it was so faint that it gave the impression of being a distant message from some unknown place. And there it was, the tragic story of an old woman who's been missing for at least two weeks. Has anyone seen here, know of her whereabouts? She was probably suffering from the onset of dementia and though I don't know her (though her Welsh name sounds familiar) I felt immensely sad. Since I always try and distance myself from real life by reading or writing this blog I immediately thought of the profoundly sad opening third of Dora Suarez. 

After being mugged last year I now sometimes walk home late at night and if I see a woman on her own walking past me say something to myself, like, 'God protect her'.

That night-have I written about this, I wonder- I survived by sheer good fortune (or what we'd call kismet). On the floor, my head spinning, the world and time standing still and yet also whirring around me, I somehow managed to pull myself up and run for safety. All that was lost was a library book, The Third Concept of Liberty. 

Increasingly I'm beginning to understand 'the east'(as it used to, or at least I imagine used to, exist): an acceptance that there is nothing to do, nowhere to go...a dislike of venturing out, an unexplainable gladness on reaching home and settling down to a hot cup of tea and a novel.

In the world everything is lost and found-except, perhaps, my book. Love, too. The great lines from Neko: Nothing lasts forever, but/and I will always love you. There can be no end to the flux of the world, of course, no time regained. But at least there can be casual moments of forgetfulness, a temporary stay order.