A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online Page B

was at any rate grateful to see Chang’s little Chinese ladies taken seriously somewhere and not relegated to the status of mere point-events rather than souls. I was happy, too, in a way that only an old man can be, that I had lived through a period when woman was not a mere happening but a wholesale Event. When She came into a room we all sprang to our feet to find her a chair; we sat down and waited for her to speak. And when she left we all bounded to open the door for her. And when it closed behind her we all sighed in unison and gazed at one another, exclaiming ‘By Jove! What?’ and fingering out beards and moustaches. Her value to us was far greater than that of a machine à plaisir in the conventional seaside picture-postcard sense. Nor was she just an earth-Mama – for in those days fathers existed, had duties, were accorded a role to play. They were not the burnt-out cases one sees today, incapable of engendering the sexual magnetism which might justify their social role, or of providing a fertile field where a woman could deploy the grand powers of her warmth, her cherish, and the profound intuition which makes her such an incomparable tutor and uncanny guide for a man. When the knack is lost, of course, the children pay the price in psychic deprivation. This too was what the Tao was all about, for the couple and its rapport constituted the basic biological brick out of which society was constructed. If the brick lacks straw … the whole sexual methodology of the cosmos was faulted. When the couple didn’t work, nothing worked.
    Walking about among the sunny vines we also spoke about the Ox-Herding pictures and their symbolism of the soul condensing its apprehensions, turning off the cinema in the head, capturing the herd. For me, however, I preferred the imagery from another context – I think Arabic – of the religious instinct like a caged bird which one day escapes into the room. Thenceforward the problem is how to get it back into the cage again. The bird, of course, is intoxicated by this new-found freedom, yet it has no inkling that there is more empty space outside the room, outside the house, outside the solar system. It does not know the meaning of pure space, only a conditional space, as well as a certain longing for the security and certainty of the cage from which it has escaped. But most of these excursions into the outer reaches of philosophy were of no use to the present manuscript which he preferred to keep quite simple, as a monograph, without didactic or ethical overtones. As for the Tao and the whole complex of Chinese thought: it was I who was to benefit by leading him far afield in the moments when we broke off to eat, sleep, discuss, walk. It was enriching for me to discuss these old life-shaping passions like Lao Tsu and Chuang Tzu with someone who had fully grasped the original.
    In a general sense too I had repaid my debt to him precisely because in talking round and round the whole subject as we had done I had illuminated for him many areas of our Occidental thought which needed his consideration if he was to make his subject matter clear and penetrating to his western reader. I tested the text, in some aspects somewhat sketchy, against every kind of objection, and he was glad that I had not found it wanting. Time, too, was running out and he was expected at Cambridge, where he would be put up by a friend under rather Spartan conditions, which sometimes resulted in his having to sleep on the floor! But he looked after his clothes and his general tenue as punctiliously as a cat. Despite all offers of the maid to wash his clothes or iron them he preferred to tend them himself, passing a wet cloth over them, or a warm iron. When I thought of the simple way he travelled, sleeping sitting up in trains, and so on, I was struck by how spruce he managed to keep himself. I of course regretted his going so soon. His book had formed a sort of bond between me and my