Read Online Napoleon's Roads by David Brooks - Free Book Online Page B

another. Imagine – for this is what you do – the unimagined tribe that has never before had contact with your own civilisation, and that moment when, breaking through a veil of green words, you catch your first glimpse of brown limbs, black hair and a bright bird, breaking from the high phrases, shrieks, a piercing cry that goes out over the whole forest as if to register the end of everything.’
    A Time of Strangers
    â€¦ So it was, anyway, that we entered a time of strangers. It was hard to know how it had come about. Perhaps all that can be confidently said is that we must have had a great need of them, or – could this be possible? – they as greatly and suddenly a need of us. We found ourselves painting them, writing them. We found ourselves talking about them. We found that we had begun to dream of them. It was as if we had, many of us, been given suddenly, inexplicably, enchanted spectacles, wonderful glasses, that enabled us to see what had been invisible before, or that somewhere about us, within us, a barrier, a wall, a distance had broken down and beings were able to circulate among us that had been kept away longer than any of us could know. It is hard to say when the visions, the sense of their presences began, and for some time those of us who had seen or felt them had kept them to themselves, afraid that others would not understand, fearing – in fact certain, so great had become our loneliness – that these things could only be happening to ourselves alone. Now, after longer reflection – given what we have come to know – there may be those among us who are prepared to allow a kind of mass hysteria, a contagious suggestion, as if, as with all ideas whose times have come, there had been a need for the idea of them, and that idea itself had called them into being. (Do you see there the circles in my own thought, the specious argument? But I am convinced that the very thing that propels it, that turns it in upon itself despite all sense of reason or proportion, is typical of the things that revealed them to us in the first place.) Perhaps at last all that we can say is that the name, the thought of such creatures, had come again to us, to supply the questions, the vacuums, the shadows that beauty or wonder or fear had begun so urgently to set abroad. For we had tried all else – the confidence, the encyclopaedic knowledges, the cynicism – and perhaps it was that, the exhaustion, the loss of direction, the listlessness, that created the platform for their arrival, if arrival it was and not, as at other times it seemed, a sudden, inexplicable thickening of the atmosphere about us, as if what one day had been mere air had the next become inhabited, had taken on not only sinew, motion, but visage, character, identity as familiar as it was strange, as strange as it was hauntingly familiar. For although in our painting or our writing we had transformed them, in actual appearance they were almost always like ourselves – but for the cleanliness of line, the distinctive inner light that pearled every feature, the aura about them of a pale, bruising fire (once, in November, I held a face in my hands: I hoped the scent, the cool white burning on my palms would last forever).
    It was almost the end of the world, that was the thing. At least, there were more and more of us who found ourselves close to believing it. Air was running out, space was running out, imagination was running out, and so many of us had been wrought by this to such a frenetic pace that a kind of self-destruction seemed imminent and almost logical. We had given up resisting. We had given up hoping. We had given up trying to explain. We had even stopped posturing, had even stopped thinking there was something we should say. And in that torpor had found a strange relaxation, a lightening, even a kind of undesperate, effortless joy in the irresistible insanities of the heart. And then these beings. As if