Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

Author:Anthony Burgess [Anthony Burgess]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: nothing_like_the_sun
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2012-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Riding back, presents and money bestowed and duty done, WS saw the terrible mystery of fatherhood clearly in the spring weather but, more than that, the horror of its responsibility. An actor, a playwright, he turned himself into his son an instant, a sleeping being called out of the darkness to suffer, perhaps be damned, because of a shaft of enacted lust. Out of the urgent coupling, the stave, the chord of summer morning, the melting of the night island of winter heat, he came, crowned with more than was asked for. Only from them, the makers, was hidden the enormous pulse of the engines, whose switch they touched by an alien curse concealed in the fever of rose or apple or mirror. One would ask only a candle, whose doomed flicker was grateful enough; but that other gift embarrassed, fire that could not be handled or tamed to humble sufficient processes. With that passage from intolerable heat to water there was remembered the ocean in runnels, the ocean in the corn, in the fruit-skin’s pressure, and death might be thought the desirable crown of the foul river. But instead it was fire that was found, ironically bestowed, waiting, rehearsing, with a smothered laugh, lurking in the comfort of light. The fuse of water sooner or later led to the ghastly miracle implosion which would not blast its frailest tabernacle. When the warning bell announced to the crouched hearers the wafer suffused by fire, there could be no escape, nor could the burden be purged in news (poets dead, thieves hanged, traitors torn to pieces) that cast no shiver over dawn sleep. Oneself was the storm’s centre, the heart of the giant flower. The smallest room he could rent, though with only a single friendly door fronting the light and music of traffic or carnival, would at length – when the picture was burnt, the mirror with its dream panorama shattered – still in a speck of dust open the desert and the howl of the time wind.

Calmly, he thought, before sleep in the inn at Oxford, that all over Europe and the Antipodes and Cathay and Cipango and the fabulous Americas, the gods were detonating. Yet there was only the one personal burden of being the source of the whole, the centre of the projection of shadows into the real that, bigger and undying, yet moved as oneself moved, in the mock court of an endless sterile reign to truckle and mow.

He woke in the spring morning to clutch the receding dream: in all the wood there was one leaf or acorn which, touched or gathered, would release the spring that fired the great trees on the outermost ring, and the circled fire closed in to him, trampling down, dissolving to heat and light all but the finally known – that when flesh, heart, lungs were quite wrung to irreducible ash, the exact centre would be proved in a gush of water.

But the morning wreckage floated on the raw flood and the day probed and had to be answered, a nightmare of many parcels.

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