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The poem along with this is the fruit of a certain meditation on the prose I was going to do. It may well be a substitute for it, if it says what I think it says.

You may happily not remember two lines from a poem which, again happily, has not survived: they say, anyway: "A mere post lapsarian theologian/Is a creature to be wary of," and, by 'and large, mere post-lapsarian stories is what it would be a question of.

There is for instance what recently happened, a senior colleague, if one may put it like that and one may as well, interrogating an underling in a long corridor — the theological term 'dialogue' not as yet having filtered through to the lower depths — in the course of which interrogation a wasp crawled up left leg of said senior colleague and, presumably his words being what they were, stung him. Said senior colleague screams, observes wasp resume its flight, and, interrupting his discourse to say to underling "I'll kill it I'll kill it I'll kill it", chases it at great length down the corridor, kills it, scrapes it off the wall, returns to underling, and with prefatory "That hurt," resumes speech. And he does not know that his action had some bearing on the way in which his next words were taken. And all his subsequent words.

And then, perhaps in slightly more hopeful vein, there is this : a postcard — wrongly delivered — with a view of subdued greenery "Near Giggleswick, Yorkshire", the message reading as follows: "Dear Miss Gammon, On Thursday and Friday I was soaked by the rain, today I fell in a stream. Went for 16 mile walk across a 2,000 ft. Fell today. The scenery is incredibly spectacular. Hope to have learnt a lot at the end of all this. Laurence."

But still, it is all rather depressing, and not in the least productive. Like listening to the news in Great Britain, or pretending that politics can be talked about in such a way as not to make the cat laugh before one has found an indestructible link between oneself and other people. Which is, at last, the point.

A friend once said, in comparing poems and ultimately poets, that, as distinct from say X, I seemed to be working under some kind of weight, burden.

Time and again in the last volume of his recollections, Ilya Ehrenburg has recourse to the formula: "It is all a question of human beings". And he is wrong. In A Prelude, Edmund Wilson quotes a friend as saying of The Brothers Karamazov (to whom he had lent it sometime before 1912), that there was not a Christian character in it. As if proof were needed that this outlook is still with us, and with less excuse, there is the concluding paragraph of the introduction to the Penguin translation of Karamazov, which I beg leave to quote in full: "In The Brothers Karamazov too, Dostoyevsky saw the solution of Russian troubles in the Greek Orthodox Church, but that is not why his novel is recognised as the greatest achievement of his genius. It is in the universal human drama that its greatness lies, and not in Dostoyevsky's ill-contrived attempt to transform Russia into a huge monastery". Human drama. This is a quotation from the last page of the novel Dostoyevsky actually wrote. Alyosha Karamazov is the second speaker:
 
"'Karamazov', cried Kolya, 'is it really true that, as our religion tells us, we shall all rise from the dead and come to life and see one another again, all, and Ilyusha?'

'Certainly we shall rise again, certainly we shall see one another, and shall tell one another gladly and joyfully all that has been'."

It bothers me, that where truth is so obvious and simple, a lifetime's work should be devoted to burying it.