Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read Online Free PDF Page B

intangible moral value was at the bottom of this group, how could he have expected anything but a disparate gathering? The life of the spirit had no part, it seemed, in the establishment of caste.Not, at least, in the Western World. Early Christianity cut the widest swath. So, coming from a generation that could, perhaps, be characterized by the vastness of its disposition to complain, he didn’t suppose that he could scorn men and women who must be looking for something better. That things had been better was the music, the reprise of his days. It had been sung by his elders, by his associates, he had heard it sung in college by Toynbee and Spengler. Things had been better, things were getting worse, and the lengthening moral and intellectual shadows that one saw spreading over the Western World were final. What a bore it had been to live in this self-induced autumnal twilight! He supposed that these strangers—this queer congregation—would agree with him. However, he would not dream of abdicating his airs and pretenses for their company.
    But she was always there—lightness and swiftness and the sense of an agility that flatteringly complemented his age. They dined and joked and she kissed him goodnight in the street by her house until one evening when she telephoned him and invited him to meet her, not in some church basement but in her apartment. “Don’t bother to make a reservation,” she said. “I’ll cook the dinner here.”
    That was a rainy night. It would be very unlike Sears to ally the sound of rain to his limited knowledge of love but there was, in fact, some alliance. It seemed that the most he knew of love had been revealed to him while he heard the music of rain. Light showers, heavy rains, torrential rains, floods, in fact, seemed joined in his memory to loving although this did not cross his mind while he bathed, very carefully, and dressed that evening. The importance of rainis agricultural and plenty may have been involved, since plenteousness is one aspect of love. Darkness to some degree belongs to rain and darkness to some degree belongs to love. In countless beds he had numbered his blessings while he heard the rain on the roof, heard it drip from a faulty gutter, heard it fall into fields and gardens and on the roofs and backyards of many cities. He walked across the city that night in the rain.
    At the time of which I’m writing jogging was very popular in every city of the world with which he was familiar. Toward the end of the day in Rotterdam or Moscow, in the brilliant winter afterglow that New York sometimes enjoys or in the early snows in Copenhagen you would find men and women of every imaginable age and specification going forth to enjoy a run. The only rewards for these exertions were small and worthless trophies. Commercialization would come, of course, but it would come later, and jogging was then one of the few taxing human endeavors that had absolutely nothing to do with the banks. One evening in Amsterdam or Leningrad—Sears couldn’t remember the city but he must have known something of the language—Sears had stopped a dozen joggers and asked them why they ran. “I run to find myself,” they said, “I run to lose weight, I run because I’m in love, I run to forget my debts, I run because I’ve had a stiff prick for the last three weeks and I hope to cool it, I run to escape my mother-in-law, I run for the glory of God.” He found all the answers gratifying and understandable, and now whenever at dusk in Bucharest or Des Moines, in Venice or Calgary he saw the runners appear they seemed to him the salt of the earth,they seemed to him stubborn and irreducible proof of man’s determination to excel. As he crossed the city that rainy night he was passed by many runners.
    She met him at the door wearing a wrapper, a shabby blue wrapper. He was out of his clothes in a minute. “You were hardpacked,” she said sweetly, sometime later. “You’ve burned the