Saturday, August 15, 2009
Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide above the paper's edge to the poor man's face - insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware that life's like that, it seems.
A face opposite - a boyish face - yet the knowledge in that face. Marks of reticence are on that face; lips shut, eyes shaded, doing whatever it could to hide or stultify his knowledge. A terrible thing about him, that face, that man, is that he does nothing at all. He looks at life, and with infinite weariness he moved his head from side to side until, like a top exhausted from spinning, it settled on his neck.
The flyer was no protection against such sorrow as his; the best thing to do was to fold the paper so that it made a perfect square, crisp, thick, impervious to life. Thus now armed with a shield of my own, I glanced into his eyes. He pierced through my shield; he gazed into my eyes as if searching for any sediment of courage at the depths of them and dampening it to mud. The bitterness in his eyes was like lemon on cold steel; seemingly saying "If only you knew". "O but I do...."
My lips pursed as if to spit venom at his words, pursed they remained. All I did then was to rub furiously at a spot on the glass; rubbing as if to rub something out forever; some stain, some indelible contamination. But the spot remained for all my rubbing, and I could only sink with the shudder and the clutch of the arm. He saw me. A smile of infinite irony, infinite sorrow, flitted and faded from his face. But he had communicated, shared his secret, passed his poison...
fire and ice clashed at [11:03 AM]