4
" The heartbeat is an irregular bell tolling; the footprints create ammonite patterns in the snow; they spiral in serpentine undulations, toward a complicated centre of mass, forming a beautifully inscribed hieroglyph, the earth acting as papyrus. It’s all signs and symbols; reading the emotions of another is an art, and tonight she lacks the imagination needed in order to be creative. Bewitching to behold, wings tucked neatly into the back of a loose summer jacket; his bare feet, dusky and dusty, tumble languidly toward her, over the soft crumbling ground. Dawn finds her dreams more beautiful to inhabit than reality. To her it becomes more real than the bed sheets she’s pulling close to her chest. As he approaches, she continues to watch the invocation of her desire. Wherever he steps the snow flees, it’s as if spring flowers from the very tips of his toes. She holds her breath as he slips his hand into hers, leading her away from the top of the hill on which they are standing. They don’t follow the path, instead they tread boldly over willow roots, twigs and fern leaves. Looking upwards, in order to see the colour of the sky, Dawn crosses her fingers for a shade of blue. "
13
" One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger. "
― Logan Pearsall Smith , Trivia
15
" A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Someone overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back - a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these. years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivioli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.(" In The Court of the Dragon" ) "