Read Online A Garden of Trees by Nicholas Mosley - Free Book Online Page B

lift I had a feeling of elation that I had not felt before in my life. Peter touched Annabelle gently on the shoulder, and when she looked at him I saw that she had tears in her eyes. Marius’s head was bowed as if he were asleep again. As we stepped out of the building into the night I felt as though I wanted to do something for these people because they were so peculiar.
    The square was huge and moonlit. A statue stood folded like the wings of a bird. Peter said, “I should like to get out of England because England is dying.”
    Marius said, “You do not leave a deathbed, you go to it. You go to it because a deathbed always has meaning while life very often has not.”
    â€œEngland will not admit that it is dying,” Peter said. “That is what makes it unbearable. There is nothing so ugly as a sick-room in which the patient has to pretend that he is well.”
    â€œThere is meaning even in that ugliness,” Marius said. “I do not care much about beauty and ugliness, I only care for meanings and the sadness of the world.”
    â€œI don’t,” Peter said. “I am too close to it. All I hate is ugliness and all I want is beauty.”
    Annabelle walked a little ahead of us with her coat thrown carelessly over her shoulder and the cold wind blowing against her neck. Her arms and legs were white like water, and as she moved her dress became darker than her hair which the moon made icy.
    â€œThere is no beauty without meaning,” Marius said. “You may make an image of your own and call it beauty, you may give it your praise and worship all your life, but in the end it will fail you. On a death-bed it will fail you. You cannot die beautifully without meaning.”
    â€œDie beautifully?” Peter said.
    â€œYes. And that is what faces us. Did you not say that England was dying? Well then, you die beautifully, and that is what always faces people, as individuals, at any time in history, whether or not a civilization is dying as well.”
    â€œWe should be beginning,” Peter said.
    â€œOur world is old, and with the arrogance of age it is complaining. You cannot praise it and you cannot pity it, because praise and pity are reserved for achievement. It has built its images and has seen them broken, and on its knees it is searching for the fragments that it loved. It finds them, sometimes, among the rubble of cities—a pedestal, a memory, limbs of old glories that are dug from the dust and refastened with wires to give an illusion of solidity. And then illusion is there, for some: a civilization will worship its images until there is no one left to worship them. But when there is no one left then few will ever have known what their ending has meant. And you, you hate the world, but it is you who are part of it. You want your images, you want your shapes; and your complaint is the same as the complaint of the world, the complaint that what is breakable has been broken, that what is temporal is not eternal, that what is of the earth is no more than the earth and crumbles. You have seen the pretty castles that were built in the sand, and now you are lamenting that the tide has run over them. But the tide is greater than the castles, and if it is beauty that you want then you should see the beauty in the tide. Praise and pity are the noises of history, they are not the noises of life. The noise of life is the tide. Why will you not hear it?”
    â€œI hear you,” Peter said, “but I do not hear the tide.”
    â€œYour complaint is the complaining of the body whose blood has grown thin, but the body is not the meaning and still you can love it. You look at the body and you see that it is drowned, but when you look why do you not say ‘The tide has gone over it’ instead of ‘The body is ugly’?”
    â€œWhat is the tide?” Peter said.
    â€œThat is for you to say.”
    â€œThe body is ugly,” Peter said.