Remembering by Wendell Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

box, walking fast. He meets a woman with long blonde hair, dressed in leotards, spike heels, and a zebra-striped cloth coat. He sees a couple crossing an intersection ahead of him, young and beautiful, their arms around each other, going home. He imagines them risen from their fallen clothes like resurrected souls, stepping toward each other open-armed.

    The city at night, he thinks, is like the forest at night, when most creatures have no need to stay awake, but some do, and that is well, for the place itself must never sleep. Some must carry wakefulness through the sleep of others.
    He is walking northward, along Mason, toward Aquatic Park. He wants to reach the city’s edge. He longs for the verge and immensity of the continent’s meeting with the sea. Stopping now and then to listen and to turn and look down into the street behind him, he climbs slowly up the steepening hill. It is shadowy and dim between the streetlights; above him, above the building tops, the sky is dark, its still spaces measured out by stars and the dwindling moon. He pauses by a tiny garden behind a wall, dusky and still amid the buildings; it contains a few dark shrubs and flowers whose pale blossoms seem to float in the shadows. A bird is singing there, and another somewhere toward the top of the hill. The dawn must be beginning now; there must be a little paling in the eastern sky, invisible yet within the city’s bright horizon. But at the next cross street, looking eastward across the bay, he sees a cloud with just the first suggestion of daylight touching its underside.
    At the top of the hill the Fairmont is brightly lighted. The pavement in front has just been washed, and the lights shine in the wet. Andy stops on the corner to look. He would like to go into the lobby and see it, opulent and empty so early in the morning. He almost does so, and then stops, remembering himself: a one-handed man, unshaven and carelessly dressed. He does not want some elegant-mannered doorman or clerk to ask him, “May I help you?” He stands and looks and goes by, and on across
the hilltop and onto the downward slant of the street. Behind him a robin is singing in the foliage of one of the cropped sycamores in front of the Pacific Union, and he can hear a street sweeper whistling prettily over the harsh strokes of his broom.
    There are trees now, here and there along the street, their crowns dark. As he passes under one of them a bird begins to sing in it, a complex lyric sung as if forgotten all through the night and now remembered. Now wherever trees are, singing is in them. Where the buildings are the city is, and is quiet. Where the trees are the world is, and a sweet worldsong is singing itself in the dark.
    He is a walker in the dark, excluded from the songs around him.

    Taxis are creeping along the empty streets almost silently, like beasts of prey. A baby cries, and high in a dark wall to his left a window is suddenly lighted. At the corner of Jackson Street he stops while a noisy Volkswagen bus pauses at the intersection, but when the bus shifts gears and goes on, Andy continues to stand still, looking down Jackson at the bay. He can see the lights of the Bay Bridge stepping out into the air above the dark water. He can hear the cable car machinery humming under the street. A man in a hooded shirt, walking a dog, crosses Jackson and goes on up the hill, his steps echoing in the quiet. Andy is filled with a yearning toward this place. He imagines himself living here. He would have a small apartment up here on the hillside, a cliff dwelling, looking out over the bay. He would live alone, and slowly he would come to know a peacefulness and gentleness in his own character, having nobody to quarrel with. He would have a job that he could walk to in the morning and walk home from in the evening. It would be a job that would pay him well and give him nothing to worry about before he went to it or after he left it. In his spare time he