Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  For minutes he did not move. I watched a pair of crows, as they pursued each other from tree to tree in the roadway. Jealous fantasies were roused by their raucous cries: Linda’s kisses, no longer innocent, but lapped up like gravy by hearty young men. The pain grew until, almost unbearable, it suddenly burst and dissolved. In its place came an anxious desolation, as I surveyed the changeless changing of the street outside, and thought of the moments stretching to infinity and the arrow of the present forever lodged in my brain. Without warning Bill jumped to his feet and began speaking in a rapid voice, like a machine gun.

  “O.K. so you like girls Michael Sillitoe, you are normal and natural and bourgeois and boring and a credit to your parents. You have decided to humour your ascetic neighbour, and squeeze culture out of him like juice from an orange, since girls like culture and, within reasonable limits, parents don’t mind it either. And of course it helps that your neighbour is a freak fit for nothing except to stand vigil at the grave of art and wait for the resurrection. And then, of course, you’ll be off to Cambridge to equip yourself with a degree in science and old Bill will be forgotten.”

  There was much more in that vein before he collapsed on the sofa in tears. I stared at Bill in the way one stares at accidents and insects. I didn’t know much about life. But I knew that if I did not deny Linda, it was all over with Bill, and that it would soon be all over with Bill in any case. I decided to deny Linda. I wanted to play for time, before returning to my galaxy. I told him that I was as much an ascetic as he was, that I had been interested in Linda, but only for cultural reasons, and on account of this vision of England that had been troubling me. And as I fumbled my way through those elegiac emotions, expecting geysers of mockery to erupt at any moment from his shining skull-cap, I remembered Linda’s kisses, and the clear, fresh promise of a redemption that was something higher and finer than anything that could be said in words. Bill did not mock. Instead he stared at me with growing horror, and at last held his hands to his ears.

  “Stop, stop,” he said, “this can’t go on. England, shmingland, you sound like the Archers. Where did you pick up that stuff? Certainly not from me. Listen, let me tell you something. T.S. Eliot was an American, brought up on German philosophy. He couldn’t care a fuck about England, the real England I mean, and might as well have lived on another planet. His religion was as phony as yours is, and everything that’s good in his poetry came from Mallarmé and Baudelaire and Laforgue.”

  The anger in Bill’s voice was directed not to what I had said, but to what I had not said. He was beating Linda into oblivion, driving her from the sphere of our friendship. And I saw with a terrible apprehension that Bill had no other resource. He had stood for months at the window of his parents’ house, hoping to be offered a reason for existing. One day I passed, and he saw that I was that reason. Since then he had emptied at my feet his store of knowledge. As the conflagration raced through my mind, I understood why I could not discuss love and sex with Bill. Something would become explicit which must be concealed.

  Bill ranted for a while about T.S. Eliot, went to put a record on the turntable, thought better of it, poured a slug of whisky down his throat, coughed, ranted again, and at last stood in a state of shaking dereliction by the window, wrapping himself in the mustard-yellow curtains, and staring crazily at the Victorian milkmaid whose figure formed the pattern in the wallpaper. The real loss, I understood, is the loss of that which you never possessed—like my loss of Linda, and Bill’s loss of me. The sight of his need disturbed me, and I wanted to run from the house and be alone—maybe forever. But that which disturbed me also transfixed me.

  Bill began speaking again, this time quietly, tonelessly, so that I had to strain to catch his words.

  “There’s one thing you’ve got to realize Michael, which is that our world wasn’t made in England. Nothing remains of England, except the mockery that you see from this window. The England of Gray’s Elegy is no more real than the England of Wordsworth or Dickens or George Eliot: it has been swept away with the Empire and the aristocracy and the great lake of illusions which was the Anglican church. All that remains is a pack of Christmas cards. Our world—the one where you and I exist, and maybe no one else at all, certainly no one else for miles and miles around—that world was made in Germany. It was made by Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner. It was made by Kant and Hegel and Fichte and Schopenhauer. It was made by Goethe and Schiller and Rilke and Thomas Mann. We are boxed-in romantics, and we have painted our world on the walls of our prison. German culture provided our themes: it showed us how to rejoice in loneliness, it showed us how to look down on normal life and plant thought-bombs on its highways. That is how we—you and I, that is—survive. But down there, where the others live, great heaps of junk are building up, the debris of a dead civilization. In fact, should you even call it a civilization?”

  Bill looked at me suddenly. Of a certainty he was not giving me a tutorial about German culture. He was trying to warn me, but against what?

  “There is a book that I should like you to avoid. It is called The Decline of the West. You will not have heard of it, and you are to behave as though it did not exist. The geezer who wrote it was a German too, and a romantic, who believed that he was living at the end of things, that nothing lay before him save a desert of hilarious trivia, a kind of cultural moonscape trampled by orange-trousered morons eating candy-floss. If you think that you go mad. You’ve got to decamp to a private world. You’ve got to fill the space of your solitude with pure and beautiful things. You’ve got to live in memory and alienation and Sehnsucht. And you’ve got to turn your monk’s eyes on the crowd and see through them as though they were air.”

  His soft laugh had returned, and as he spoke he slowly and carefully worked himself free from the curtain, as though unwrapping a gift. In the light from the window his skin was stretched and powdery, and his head was a hollow skull. His words were like a testament, and I sensed that he would soon be dead. I held myself taut as he came across to me. His lips on my cheek were cold, dry and motionless, and he trembled slightly as he stroked my arm.

  “The Giants will be home in a moment,” he said. “Come tomorrow evening. They’ll be playing whist. We’ll listen to Tristan.”

  I did not sleep that night. Bill’s deathly kiss lingered for hours, burning a hole in my cheek, seeking the enduring bone in me. Under its spell I became a memento mori, and the thought of Bill holding and kissing my skull filled me with horror. Linda would have made me whole and safe. But Linda was gone. Nothing stood between me and disaster save my own will, and my will needed a bit more of a supporting cast than was currently available.

  I began to marshal the arguments against Bill, and of course there were many. He had been urging me to break with everything, to be an outsider, sleeping rough somewhere in a hammock, while plotting the end of the world. Yet his own rebellions were mere naughtiness: stealing his parents’ whisky, sometimes crushing in one hand one of the worthless ornaments that invigilated his prison. It was the ordinariness of those day-to-day misdemeanours that struck me. This wasn’t the breakout, the over-turning, the gran rifiuto that he had encouraged. It had nothing of the cultivated soul, who rises above constraints and laws and conventions only to endorse them from a point of unshriven transgression, who feels in his innermost self the pain of the cosmic order that he also betrays. The crazy thing was that I should have attributed such a stance to Bill, as he passed between the back door and the front door of his parents’ house or sat enthroned in their garage inventing himself as a fiction in order not to live among facts.

  I decided to put off my initiation into Tristan. I formed the habit of walking around the block to the bus-stop, avoiding Bill’s house. But for all my rebellion against him, Bill was ever-present within me, urging me, guiding me, prising me loose from the world. I was still a character in one of his stories, confined by the inverted commas that he had planted around my life. I spent my afternoons in the German sect
ion of the public library, reading in translation the authors whom he had recommended, not daring to take the volumes home lest I should fall forever under their spell, but confining them to a corner of my dull existence. It was on a chill October afternoon, rooting through the shelves and thinking with self-dramatizing grief of Linda’s kisses, that I came across Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Curious, I took down the first volume and opened it at random. Here was what I read:

  One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

  The words were simple, but they astonished me. I embraced the idea at once, as though it had always unconsciously been mine. The culture I had grasped from Bill and Dr. Jackson was destined to disappear, had already vanished except from those small private places, like Bill’s drab living room, where its after-image lingered in eyes that had turned from the universal conflagration so as to shine into the dark. And as I leafed through those pages that purported to summarize the history of all civilizations, and to show the parallel destiny of each of them in decay and death, a kind of exhilarating grief arose within me. The book was addressed directly and personally to me, linking my emotions to the destiny of the world. I was caught up in a drama of untold proportions and, just as the worshipper leaps to discover God’s personal interest in him; just as the psychoanalytic patient feels a renewed will to live on learning that his petty suffering conforms to some universal archetype; so did I become happy in my mournful emotions, knowing that it was not I, but culture itself, that was alive in them, and also dying there.

  I borrowed the book, and read through the night. Seldom had I been gripped as I was gripped by that opening chapter, in which mathematics is thrown from its pedestal. Mathematics, the heart of my studies, the paradigm of certainty, the foundation of science, was promoted from science to culture, and then dashed to the floor. The “Faustian” mathematics of the West, set beside the “Magian” mathematics of Arabia and the “Apollonian” mathematics of Euclid, appeared neither more nor less valid than they. It ceased to be an objective science and became instead an expression of the Faustian spirit that lives and thrives in all the great creations of our culture, and whose death-pangs had been foretold in me. Spengler granted a vision above science, above fact, above theory and knowledge, a vision that made me privy to the meaning of the world. And the strange thing was that this final proof that Western culture must die, was all but dead already, attached me the more firmly to it, made me determined to store within myself the precious heritage, and take it with me to the grave. In those early morning hours of a damp October day in a suburban street in Surrey, I became a mystic, a prophet of doom, and a German.

  Except for the squads of motorcycles that occasionally roared through our streets, the nights were silent. From time to time I would look up from my desk in the attic bedroom, and stare at the houses opposite, silhouetted against the yellow glare from the Croydon suburbs. In a week I was to take my Cambridge entrance exam. After that I would be gone from here—fleeing in the cold dawn light and leaving only a note for my parents. And a thousand crazy schemes rushed through my mind—I would live rough on London streets, work my passage on a cargo ship, join a bank like T.S. Eliot, or find some noble protector. And I would carry within me the secret knowledge that, wherever I was, I did not belong.

  Immersed again in Spengler it was some time before I took note of the soft steady padding of footsteps in the street below. It was four in the morning, and the suburb slumbered in its blank repose. But someone patrolled beneath my window, someone anxious and sleepless and alone. It could not be Bill, since a screen of psychic electricity prevented him from straying more than a hundred yards from his house. Therefore it was Linda, penitent and full of yearning, escaped from her Oxford college to beg forgiveness. This idea grew so quickly and strongly that it was soon irresistible, and, not daring to disprove it by leaning from the window, I crept down the stairs, past the perfumed mausoleum where my parents slept, to the hallway, where the street-light cast a shadow against the frosted glass of the door.

  It was the shadow of a man, tall, thin, and bald, who raised his hands above his head in a posture of defence. Lest he should knock and wake my parents, I quickly took my coat from the rack in the hallway and went into the street.

  “We must begin from the assumption that all conceivable weapons have been used,” Bill whispered. His lips trembled and his eyes stared wildly past me into the dark interior of our house. “You are therefore no longer capable of hurting me.”

  I walked quickly away from the house and he followed me.

  “Don’t think you can run away from me. I shall always be there. I made you, Michael Sillitoe, I won’t let you forget it, I made you.”

  He was speaking more loudly, using words that were unutterable in a street like ours. I hurried on in anguish. A hundred yards from our house there stood an old transformer station, behind which a footpath between back gardens led to a piece of common ground. This ground contained no roads or lights or houses, only the debris of human reproduction: prams, fridges, and cycle frames among the thorns. If I could reach it I would be safe, and the tirade that was just beginning would spend itself unheard. But the narrow footpath permitted only a single file, and Bill, following close behind, was impatient to be heard.

  “Whatever you know that’s worth knowing, you know because of me. Don’t deny it Michael Sillitoe. You’re a shit, do you hear? A snivelling little bourgeois little suburban little shit, spick and span little normal little righteous little tit-fondling cunt-coveting shit, a prayerful, pastoral, piss-artistic, Pan-pessimistic prig of a shit...”

  Whatever the value of culture, it is more or less useless in a crisis. Words said in jealous anger come from deeper down, are smeared with the rotting compost of our early years, and are vomited into the conversation as proof of our foul insides. I hated Bill, and also feared him. I mumbled at him to lower his voice, to wait till we could talk, to have some respect. But it only made things worse.

  “Ho ho!” he roared. “I am to wash my mouth out, drink rose water and balsamic oils, smear orrery and potash on my crumbling teeth, have my tongue sent to the cleaners, book myself in for a larynx by-pass, maybe a heart and soul by-pass, so that Michael Sillitoe will not be ashamed in front of the neighbours!”

  A dog barked nearby, and then another. The footpath was dark and my feet were splashing in unseen ruts and puddles. Bill reached out to take hold of my sleeve, but I snatched it away from him and hurried on. We reached the common, where the yellow glow of the suburban night shone on our faces, and I turned to him.

  “You’re to leave me alone, O.K.? I have my life to lead, see? I’ve got exams next week for God’s sake!”

  He laughed at this, and I wasn’t surprised. Whatever excuse I made would merely trace a path away from him. He shook his head and chuckled mirthlessly.

  “Michael, Michael,” he said with mocking gentleness. He spread his arms to either side, and then let them flap against the long black overcoat he wore, as though to illustrate the futility of all embraces. I felt no pity for him: I was young, frightened, my life had not begun; all I wanted was out. Escape became the order of the day—escape not from Bill only, but from the place and the time that contained him.

  “Listen Bill. I’m serious. Of course I’m grateful for everything. But I can’t give you what you want. It’s right off the agenda.”

  He stared at me and began to pant rhythmically.

  “You don’t know what I want. You don’t care what I want. What do you think it’s like, being me? Have you ever asked yourself? Ten years of darkness, and now the doors closing again. Just tell me her name, for Christ’s sake!”

  His face in the yellow half-light seemed eaten away, clinging in tatters to the skull, and the eyes were caverns of darkness. I tried to hide my disgust, and he starte
d towards me, his chest heaving and sobbing, his hands tearing at my clothes. I struggled to free myself, but he held my arms in an iron grip and shook me, howling like a dog into my face. I took a quick decision.

  “She’s irrelevant,” I said. “She’s gone. Listen Bill. Just give me a week—it’s all I ask. Then we can work things out.”

  He stopped howling and released my arms.

  “Oh, of course we can work things out,” he said. “And you’ll come round just as you always did, and maybe—”

  He broke off with a frightened stare.

  “Where are we Michael? How did we come here? Oh God, I’ve got to get back!”

  He was already running towards the footpath. I watched him but I did not follow. Then he stopped and turned, his mouth open, his hands flapping about his head.

  “Michael! Michael! Help me!”

  He sank to his knees in the mud, his upturned face gasping for air. Still I felt no pity for him, and although I was scandalized by my heartlessness, I made no move towards him. I was schooling myself to reject all responsibility for Bill. He was over and done with.

  Bill was sobbing now, his face in his hands, the shining cap of his skull bobbing up and down like a ball in water. I went slowly over to him.

  “Get up now Bill. You must go home.”

  He glanced up at me from eyes boiling with tears.

  “Hard is the descent to God,” he said. “But he’s there, waiting. I’ll reach him soon. I’ll rescue him. Just trust me Michael.”

  He shook his head sadly, then rose to his feet. As I led the way down the footpath to our street, he followed meekly, head bowed and hands heavy at his sides. A few lights had come on in the windows. Someone pulled back the curtains in the house next to Bill’s. I guided him by the elbow on to the gravel driveway. He turned back to me.

  “And then, when the exams are over, you’ll come round for Tristan? Maybe next Wednesday? It’s a whist evening. They’ll be out.”