The Mark on the Wall

Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists…

But as for that mark,

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.

Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known.

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall

I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all.

Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?