My Time in Space Read Free Page B

for bringing into consciousness London’s suppressed geography – for instance, a walk along the course of the long-built-over Kilburn, the Kyle Burn of lost rural ways, leaving a bunch of watercress on the doorstep of each police station I passed – could be seen not only as whimsical but as life-denying . The city builds, tears down, rebuilds, its own horizons; its skylines burgeon and decay like the close-packed petals of a rose. For the truly London pastime of identifying from half-obscured profiles buildings with names and histories, Primrose Hill, on the verge of the inner city, is the place. I forget what exactly is underfoot at the highest point of that shallow dome of trim grass and treed walks, but it is worn down into hardness or concreted or tarmacked, as if the constant directing of attention away from it to the vistas below has somehow annulled it. I used to call it ‘The Point of View’ and identified it with the site of the foot of Jacob’s ladder, and indeed it did occasionally reveal a visionary dimension to the city. One evening M and I were strolling on the slopes of the hill when we met a poet of our acquaintance coming down. He said, ‘There’s a lot of people up there; they must be expecting an event,’ and went on his way hunched in introspection. We hurried up to join the gathering on the Point of View. Nothing was happening but the evening itself; the event was London’s bewitchment by the level rays of sunset, its transformation into a poet’s city, Samarkand, Xanadu.
Lines of Latitude
    Flying across the Great Plains, say from New Orleans to Denver, one looks down at a flatland divided precisely into squares, most of them further divided into four. Many of these smaller lots contain a huge circle, the extent of a crop irrigated by sprays on a centrally pivoted, slowly rotating beam; anyone seeing these discs forthe first time will think, as I did, of a giant game of draughts played on an endless board. Underlying and half-effaced by this modern, rectilinear, rule-bound geography is another, vague, senescent, of sprawling elevations that look too slight to be captured in contours, and meandering streambeds abandoned to stagnancy and evaporation. If nature seems to be wandering at a loss in a directionless expanse, the work of humans knows the cardinal points of the compass exactly, and the roads that follow and define the boundaries of lots are singlemindedly intent on getting out of here, wherever ‘here’ is, as directly as possible. As the shadow of the plane advances over it for hour after hour, the agricultural geometry at last begins to lose conviction, the succession of squares wears out, a subdued chaos of desert shows through. Eventually only a few highways persist in their monomaniac westward career towards the Rockies.
    Westward is the warp-direction, the underlying and sustaining drive of ruthless purpose, in this awe-inspiring tapestry of the advance of the frontiers of cultivation. A thousand miles of Euclid might also appear to be a convincing demonstration of the flatness of the Earth, the potentially limitless extent of human domination, but on reflection the grand theorem of the Plains proves just the opposite. While Manifest Destiny is obviously responsible for the general westwards trend of this landscape, why is it in fact orientated so precisely east-west? Could it not have run towards the west-north-west, for example, or in whatever other direction historical contingencies might have aimed it initially? In laying out such a uniform schema, the ideal would be for at least one set of boundaries to be straight and parallel, i.e. to maintain a constant compass-bearing and a constant lateral separation. But a line that intersects the meridians at any fixed angle other than ninetydegrees will wind around the globe and if prolonged will eventually spiral in towards one of the Poles; therefore another line starting at a given separation from it and following the same