The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together and walked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presented themselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, a hint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenly jumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streets but at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the time of which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert. There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed to it. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating away into the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such forms come! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one painting of those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was only dumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless. I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and the very hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace and happiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in this light,” I said to myself.
As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’s business to make it stand still—well, just to fix the moment, in a painting, in a tale, in a poem.
Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I remembered something. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which I had once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had called it, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:
I have wished that the wind would stop blowing, that birds would stop dead still in their flight, without falling into the sea, that waves would stand ready to break upon shores without breaking, that all time, all impulse, all movement, mood, hungers, everything would stop and stand hushed and still for a moment.
It would be wonderful to be sitting on a log in a forest when it happened.
When all was still and hushed, just as I have described, we would get off the log and walk a little way.
The insects would all lie still on the ground or float, fixed and silent in the air. An old frog, that lived under a stone and that had opened his mouth to snap at a fly, would sit gaping.
There would be no movement, in New York, in Detroit, in Chicago down by the stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on farms.
Out in Colorado, where a man was riding a horse furiously, striving to catch a steer to be sent to Chicago and butchered—
He would stop, too, and the steer would stop.