Border Districts
Page 12
For many years after I had first read the resolution on the back of the holy card mentioned above, I supposed that the author of the resolution had written it in comparatively recent times. I supposed that the town mentioned was his local suburb, through which he travelled each week to be umpire at school football or cricket matches. Or, I supposed that the town mentioned was the central part of the capital city through which he travelled by tram on certain afternoons when he had to attend as a part-time student some or another lecture or tutorial at the university. I supposed the man had wanted to guard his eyes against the sight of image after image of young women with bare legs and low necklines outside the cinemas that he passed. While I was writing the previous two paragraphs, however, I saw the writer of the resolution as writing it while he was still a young man, hardly more than a boy. I saw him as being still a student in the training-house of his religious order in a western district of the state to the north of the state where he later taught in an inner eastern suburb of the capital city. I saw him as writing on his card while he sat or knelt in the chapel of the building that had been formerly a mansion where lived one after another generation of pastoralists. The student, so I supposed, had wanted to guard his eyes on the two or three occasions each year when he travelled with his fellow-students on some or another holiday-excursion through the streets of some or another quiet township in the west of his state. He had not wanted to catch sight of some or another female face of the sort that he might have been likely to fall in love with. He wanted to remain true to the image lying between the pages of the book in his hands. When I first saw him writing, I saw above him a window of coloured glass installed by the order of brothers soon after they had occupied the building. One of the images in the window was of the same female personage whose image appeared on the obverse of the card that he was writing on. Soon afterwards, I saw above him one of the windows that the previous owners of the building had installed long before. The images in that window seemed meant to suggest stems and leaves and petals.
After I had finished my secondary schooling more than fifty years ago, I made no effort to keep in contact with my former teachers or with any of my former schoolmates. Even so, I began to receive, a few years ago, copies of a periodical published by a society the members of which include some of my old schoolfellows. Someone, apparently, had supplied my address to the society. My habit is to leaf through the periodical looking for familiar faces among the reproductions of photographs of so-called old collegians at so-called functions and looking also among the lists of deceased old collegians for names of former classmates of mine.
The illustrations in the periodical mentioned show not only former pupils of my school but former teachers. I had heard from time to time during the decades when it was fashionable for priests and religious to break their vows – I had heard sometimes that this or that former teacher of mine had become a teacher in the state system or a truck driver or a volunteer in some or another African country. I would not have been surprised to learn that the order of brothers who had taught me had dwindled to a handful of aged men. Perhaps they have thus dwindled, but the few depicted in the periodical seem cheerful enough. I supposed also that the brothers would have long since discarded their black and white habit. So they have, but they still garb themselves distinctively in a cassock of white. I saw all in white in a recent issue of the periodical an image of the elderly man whose prayer-book I pried into long ago, he who had sworn to guard his eyes while in town.
In a recent issue of the periodical mentioned was an illustration showing an image of some or another window of stained glass in, I think, France. I have forgotten what I read in the caption beneath the illustration, but I recall clearly the subject-matter of the illustration. Depicted in the stained glass was the founder of the order of religious brothers mentioned often hereabouts together with the young men who were his first followers. Each young man is shown as wearing a robe of black with a white bib at his throat. None of these details surprised me, but I cannot account for each young man’s being shown as having his eyeballs lying to one side: as looking from the sides of his eyes.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I regretted that I have never been able to recall the details of the windows of the chapel in the grounds of my secondary school. I have no doubt that the windows were of coloured glass, but I recall only a certain golden or reddish glow inside the chapel.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, I heard in my mind two lines of poetry that I first read while I was a student at secondary school and have never since read. In one or another year of my secondary education, I was required to study three so-called Romantic poets. One was John Keats, some of whose poems I still recall. The other two were Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I took a strong dislike to each of these two, partly as a result of my having learned something of their life-stories and partly on account of their poetry, which seemed to me fatuous and affected. And yet I foresaw, soon after I had begun to write this report, that I would be compelled to include in it a certain two lines from some or another poem by Shelley: lines that I had once found merely decorative and without meaning but have remembered for more than fifty years in spite of myself.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.