Being Light 2011 Read Free Page B

pillow cases and leaving them overnight in buckets of coloured water, twisting elastic around his legs then jumping high and clear of it. All these activities were unfathomable.
    Harvey remembers the morning he and the rest of his class spent their time folding scratchy pieces of paper very small and snipping at them with scissors with rounded ends. ‘You’ve made a snowflake,’ the teacher told him. The information gave him some comfort, even though it was a palpable untruth. Once one of the activities had been named he could ask for it again, or avoid it, or measure it against other things with the same name.
    It was only in his nightmares, or under the bed, or behind the curtains in the dark that shapeless frightening things remained, still unnamed.
    A phone call brings Harvey back from the darkness and he opens his eyes.
    ‘Your advertising campaigns for cars are very successful.’
    ‘Well, thank you. I can’t really take the credit. I’m a hired hand - part of a creative team. I’m sorry, I don’t think I recognise your voice.’
    ‘Mine is a lone voice roaring in a concrete jungle.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘I’m the one who’s going to make you see that you’re wrong. I’m going to stop the traffic.’
    Harvey walks upstairs to Alison.
    ‘Do you know what cars are doing to this planet?’
    ‘The lead in the petrol makes children stupid. Cars clutter up the streets and knock cyclists off their bikes. The fumes from the exhaust turn the buildings black and they wither the trees at the side of the road. Ask Taron, she goes out morning,
noon
and night to try and revive the trees.’
    ‘Do you ever feel like campaigning for a cause?’
    ‘No. Causes are for students, politicians and the childless.’
    Harvey lives in Alison’s basement. He likes to talk to her about the need to define and label everything in his life.
    ‘If something doesn’t have a name, how can it be ?’ he asks. ‘If you’ve never heard something described or named, how can you know you want it? How can you be sure you’ve ever experienced it? Once you’ve given something a name, you’ve captured it and made something constant in an inconstant world.’
    ‘Like naming stars?’ asks Alison.
    ‘Naming stars doesn’t count. They’re intangible, too far away. It would be like naming particles of dust. It doesn’t contribute anything to our experience of the world.’
    ‘I think naming stars is cute.’
    ‘Yes, it’s cute, but it doesn’t affect anyone except the person who’s named it. No one would ever see the star and wonder what it was called. The whole thing is too remote from our normal world.’
    ‘What about feelings? They’re intangible.’
    ‘Describing feelings is different than naming stars. Feelings influence the way everyone acts and so they make the world the way it is. But I’ve often wondered, if you don’t have a name for a feeling, then maybe you don’t feel it. There’s a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that’s like homesickness but it’s stronger, it evokes a kind of national pride as well. I don’t think English people feel that word. The thing is, if the word existed in English, would it increase the range of people’s feelings? Would some people feel like that?’
    ‘Are you saying that if you don’t know about something then you can’t feel it?’
    ‘Maybe. If you don’t know a place exists, how can you know you want to go there? If you’d never heard about New York , if it wasn’t even called by any name, how would you know how exciting it was? Once a few people have come back and said, “You must go to New York, it is a city that never sleeps,” you know you will go there eventually.’
    ‘Maybe that’s why so many people feel so lost. There’s a place they should be, but they don’t know it exists or where it is or how to get there. Do you ever feel that you’re adrift, Harvey ?’
    ‘Yes. I don’t know