Spring Night

[Zadown]

The normal thoughts marched through his bald head – the usual parade of stats, dreams and shallow virtual memories, all centred on his current favourite computer game. This and that could be reached, if he could spare the hours for the boring xp grind, wrist and boots could be upgraded with some raid gear, so on and so on, a tight looped train of thought chasing its own tail. In the background his decrepit shoes made their odd, loud noise every time they hit asphalt. Wind blowing through their holes, then through the holes in his socks distracted the lone traveller in the night and made him aware of his surroundings, got him to raise his gaze from the dark road.

 

Somewhere deep inside his brain a switch clicked to a new position. It had hovered between the everyday “Existential Angst” and “Escapist Obliviousness”, but now it snapped to “Existential Euphoria” for a brief moment. The world, the real one, came into focus: an asphalt road curving to the right, black in the unreal light of northern spring night, vividly blue but mostly clouded sky suspended above him in the state between dark and light, streetlights blazing as modern stars so close you could almost touch them. Trees, birches still mere naked wooden skeletons, firs as clothed as always, lining the road on both sides even here almost in the heart of this little town, a real forest of them covering the hill on the other side of the road; ugly square houses and silent, sleeping cars ahead, towards the centre of the town. No other people anywhere, no distant sounds of cars, no flickering blue lights of TVs, ambulances or police cars in sight. Instead the soft velvet-like silence of undisturbed night was cut to shreds by birds trying to out-sing each other. They claimed their territories and did it unopposed – this time of the night was theirs, even if some silly human was still walking around. It smelled faintly of the promise of growth, of dew and rain and decay. The smells of a forest.

 

He lowered his gaze again and continued his ungainly but fast walk. The moment had passed. He could not decipher the birds, and as all noises incomprehensible it too turned into white noise, then faded to background. In front of him the first hints of dawn started to appear in the horizon, the light not getting a good hold on his black clothes but defining even him better by contrast – behind him the birds went on with their gossip, disturbed less by the traveller than they had disturbed him.

[The Portrait of Zool]

What a wonderful epiphany as a moment of realisation, or connection, for plot movement in a drama between characters. From that fork in the road one could go in any direction.

 

By itself it is simply a sad statement of the awareness (or lack of) of one individual.

[Finnius]

Wow... man's involvement in one 'world' leaves him incognizant of another. In failing to notice the everyday beauty around us, we become part of it, simply by our natural being. (Or something like that.)

 

Such are we all.

 

Wonderfully provocative, to steal a phrase from every book on the New York Times Bestseller List.