397 – The Mark on the Wall
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I'll have a link for this in the description of the show. Thanks. Hey, my name's Otis Gray, and you're listening to Sleepy, a podcast where I read old books to help you get to sleep. And this is a midweek short story for you. Tonight, I have a Virginia Woolf short story for you. It's been a while since we've read some Virginia Woolf on the show, but her writing is truly marvelous. It's no surprise why her writing has stood the test of time.

And wow, she was so prolific. I really like this story and I think it's going to be great to fall asleep to tonight. And before we get to the bedtime reading, I just want to generally thank all of our amazing patrons on patreon.com, which is a website where you can pledge a couple bucks to listen to an ad-free version of the show. So if you're a patron, thank you so, so much. I really, really appreciate it. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about,

Patreon is just a really great website that allows you to directly support the people who make the stuff that you like. So if you like Sleepy, if it helps you get to sleep or rest, or maybe you just like listening to the stories during your day, then consider going to patreon.com, supporting the show and being directly a part of making it. If you donate $1...

Any amount, actually. I'll read your name in the opening credits of the next Sunday show after you do. At $2, you get access to the ad-free version of Sleepy, like I said. At $5, you get access to our poetry feed, where there is more Virginia Woolf. But regardless how much you donate, I'm so grateful. And I will read your name on the show if you do. So again, that is patreon.com slash sleepy radio. Thank you.

And as always, the music you're hearing is by my good friend James Lepkowski. And the cover art for Sleepy is by Gracie Kena. So as I said, tonight I'm going to be reading some Virginia Woolf. She wrote some really mesmerizing little short stories. And I'm going to be reading one of those tonight, which is called The Mark on the Wall. I really like this story in that it is incredibly dreamlike and kind of ethereal.

It feels when you're reading it like it makes so much sense and also so little sense at the same time. How to explain that any better. But it really does focus on a mark on a wall and then just meanders. It was pretty mesmerizing to read. So I think you're going to like going to sleep to it. You're actually going to hear this full story once so you can fall deep asleep and then it will repeat itself so you can stay deep asleep.

I really like doing that because the repetition I think helps me really zone in and conk out. And I would love to know if you like that format for Sleepy where these shorter stories repeat themselves. So you get longer episodes and the repetition might help actually cue your brain into focusing and sleeping. I would love to know if this works for you. So if it does or doesn't, um...

Let me know in the comments on Spotify, please. I'd love to hear from you. So, without further ado, tonight, The Mark on the Wall, a short story by Virginia Woolf. And now is the time for you to fluff up your pillow, just how you like it. Feel yourself melt into your bed, get real comfortable, close your eyes, and let me read to you. The Mark on the Wall Perhaps it was the middle of January, in the present, that I looked up and saw The Mark on the Wall.

In order to fix a date, it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire, the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book, the three chrysanthemums and the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the wintertime, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette, and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals.

and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief, the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,

lifting it, in a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture. It must have been for a miniature. The miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud, of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way. An old picture, for an old room. That is the sort of people they were,

Very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion, art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea.

and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it. I don't believe it was made by a nail after all. It's too big, too round for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh dear me, the mystery of life, the inaccuracy of thought, the ignorance of humanity.

to show how very little control of our possessions we have, what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization. Let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime. Beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses, what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble, three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools. Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the queen and coal scuttle, the bag of taliborin,

The hand organ, all gone, and jewels too, opals and emeralds. They lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping, paring affair it is to be sure. The wonder is that I have any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the tube at 50 miles an hour, landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair, shot out at the feet of God entirely naked,

tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a chute in the post office with one's hair flying back like the tail of a ray source yes that seems to express the rapidity of life the perpetual waste and repair also casual also haphazard but after life the slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower as it turns over deluges one with purple and red light

Why, after all, should one not be born there, as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so, there will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up, perhaps,

rose-shaped blots of an indistinct color, dim pinks and blues, which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become, I don't know why. And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer. And I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper, look at the dust on the mantelpiece. For example,

The dust witch, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe. The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,

away from the surface with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. Shakespeare, well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair and looked into the fire. So, a shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand and people, looking in through the open door,

for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction, it doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent, even in the minds of modest mouse-colored people who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself. That is the beauty of them. They are thoughts like this,

And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles I. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles I? I asked. But I don't remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels to them, perhaps. And so it goes on.

All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it. For if I did that, I should catch myself out and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance.

Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all around it is there but no longer, but only that a shell of a person which is seen by other people, what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes, a world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways, we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness in our eyes,

and the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number those are the depths they will explore those are the phantoms they will pursue leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories taking a knowledge of it for granted as the greeks did and shakespeare perhaps but these generalizations are very worthless the military sound of the word is enough

It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers, a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart, save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes and habits, like the habit of sitting altogether in one room until a certain hour.

although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things—Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks—

country houses and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things, I wonder, those real standard things? Men, perhaps. Should he be a woman? The masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whittaker's table of presidency, which has become, I suppose, since the war,

Half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dust-pin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the landseer prints, gods and devils, hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom, if freedom exists. In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall, nor is it entirely circular, I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow.

suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall, it would at a certain point mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the south downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it,

Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. What sort of a man is an antiquary? I wonder. Retired colonels for the most part, I dare say, leading parties of aged laborers to the top there, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighboring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns.

and agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives who wish to make plum jam or clean out the study and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension while the colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp

and being opposed, indicts a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low. And his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case of the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine glass that Nelson drank out of

proving I really don't know what. No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known, and if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really, what shall we say, the head of a gigantic old nail driven in two hundred years ago, which is now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?

Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods, brewing herbs, interrogating shrew mice, and writing down the language of the stars? Unless we honor them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases, yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world.

A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or housekeepers, with the profiles of policemen. A world which one could slice, with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water lilies, hanging suspended over the nests of white sea eggs. How peaceful it is drowned here, rooted in the center of the world, and gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden gleams of light,

and their reflections, if it were not for Whitaker's almanac, if it were not for the table of precedency. I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose leaf, a crack in the wood. Here is nature once more in her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's table of precedency?

The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor. The Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whittaker. And the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whittaker knows, and let that. So nature counsels comfort you, instead of enraging you. And if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. I understand nature's game.

her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action, men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea. I feel a satisfying sense of reality,

which at once turns the two archbishops and the lord high chancellor to the shadows of shades here is something definite something real thus waking from a midnight dream of horror one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent worshipping the chest of drawers worshipping solidity worshipping reality worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours that is what one wants to be sure of what is a pleasant thing to think about

It comes from a tree, and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows and forests, and by the side of rivers, all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers so green, that when a moorhen dives, one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish, balanced against the stream like flags blown out,

and of water beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself, first the close dry sensation of being wood, then the grinding of the storm, then the slow delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it too, on winter's nights, standing in the empty field with all leaves close furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long,

The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in tune, and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bank, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes. One by one the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes, and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again.

Even so, life isn't done with. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. All over the world. In bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts. Happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately. But something is getting in the way. Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree, a river, the downs.

Whitaker's Almanac. The Fields of Asphodel. I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying, I'm going out to buy a newspaper. Yes. Though it's no good buying newspapers. Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. God damn this war. All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall. Ah, the mark on the wall. It was a snail. The mark on the wall.

Perhaps it was the middle of January, in the present, that I looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a day, it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire, the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book, the three chrysanthemums and the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the wintertime, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.

I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette, and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief, the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall,

about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it in a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture. It must have been for a miniature, the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.

a fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way, an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were, very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said.

and he was in process of saying that in his opinion, Art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea, and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa, as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it. I don't believe it was made by a nail after all. It's too big, too round for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it,

10 to 1 I shouldn't be able to say for certain, because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh dear me, the mystery of life, the inaccuracy of thought, the ignorance of humanity, to show how very little control of our possessions we have, what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization. Let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime. Beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses. What cat would gnaw? What rat would nibble?

three pale blue canisters of bookbinding tools. Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal scuttle, the bag of taliborin, the hand organ, all gone, and jewels too, opals and emeralds. They lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping, paring affair it is to be sure. The wonder is that I have any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything,

One must liken it to being blown through the tube at fifty miles an hour, landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair, shot out at the feet of God entirely naked, tumbling head over heels in the Asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a chute in the post office, with one's hair flying back like the tail of a racehorse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair, all so casual, all so haphazard.

But after life, the slow pulling down of thick green stalks, so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there, as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things,

that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct color, dim pinks and blues, which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become, I don't know why. And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer,

And I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper, look at the dust on the mantelpiece. For example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over. Only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe. The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another.

without any sense of hostility or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface with its hard, separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. Shakespeare. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair and looked into the fire. So, a shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand,

and people looking in through the open door. For this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction, it doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself. For those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent, even in the minds of modest mouse-colored people who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself,

That is the beauty of them. They are thoughts like this. And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles I. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles I? I asked. But I don't remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels to them, perhaps. And so it goes on.

All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it. For if I did that, I should catch myself out and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance.

Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all around it is there but no longer, but only that a shell of a person which is seen by other people, what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes, a world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways, we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness in our eyes,

and the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections. For of course there is not one reflection, but an almost infinite number. Those are the depths they will explore, those are the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did, and Shakespeare perhaps. But these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough.

It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers, all class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart, save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes and habits, like the habit of sitting altogether in one room until a certain hour.

although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things—Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks—

country houses and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things, I wonder, those real standard things? Men, perhaps. Should he be a woman? The masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whittaker's table of presidency, which has become, I suppose, since the war,

half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dust-pin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the landseer prints, gods and devils, hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom, if freedom exists. In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall, nor is it entirely circular, I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow,

suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall, it would at a certain point mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the south downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it,

Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. What sort of a man is an antiquary? I wonder. Retired colonels for the most part, I dare say, leading parties of aged laborers to the top there, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighboring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns.

an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives who wish to make plum jam or clean out the study and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension while the colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp

and being opposed, indicts a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low. And his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case of the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine glass that Nelson drank out of

proving I really don't know what. No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known, and if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really, what shall we say, the head of a gigantic old nail driven in two hundred years ago, which is now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?

Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods, brewing herbs, interrogating shrew mice, and writing down the language of the stars? Unless we honor them as our superstitions dwindle, and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases, yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world.

A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or housekeepers, with the profiles of policemen. A world which one could slice, with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water lilies, hanging suspended over the nests of white sea eggs. How peaceful it is drowned here, rooted in the center of the world, and gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden gleams of light,

and their reflections, if it were not for Whitaker's almanac, if it were not for the table of precedency. I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose leaf, a crack in the wood. Here is nature once more in her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's table of precedency?

The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor. The Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whittaker, and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whittaker knows, and let that. So nature counsels comfort you, instead of enraging you. And if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. I understand nature's game,

her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action, men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea. I feel a satisfying sense of reality,

which at once turns the two archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world, which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. What is a pleasant thing to think about?

It comes from a tree, and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows and forests, and by the side of rivers, all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers so green, that when a moorhen dives, one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish, balanced against the stream like flags blown out,

and of water beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself, first the close dry sensation of being wood, then the grinding of the storm, then the slow delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it too, on winter's nights, standing in the empty field with all leaves close furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long,

The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in tune, and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bank or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes. One by one the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again.

Even so, life isn't done with. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. All over the world. In bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts. Happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately. But something is getting in the way. Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree, a river, the downs.

Whitaker's Almanac? The Fields of Asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying, I'm going out to buy a newspaper. Yes, though it's no good buying newspapers. Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. God damn this war. All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall. Ah, the mark on the wall. It was a snail. Thank you for listening to Sleepy.

Good night.