As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city--that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.

But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time.

I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.

The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn't be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.

There are brilliant evocations of intense heat (‘the brass-taloned lion which licks the afternoon ground ready to consume anyone not wise enough to take cover’) and sunlight (it ‘struck upwards, sideways and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper’),