Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Free

true poetry has never dried up, though it’s reduced to a very small…’
    Here I suddenly broke off. What I had been saying sounded too much like a contribution to a professional brains-trust to make proper sense. I always switch off the radio when it sputters words like ‘standardization’ and ‘mechanization’ at me.
    Old See-a-Bird broke an uncomfortable silence: ‘According to the Interpreter, you have lived through two World Wars. Did any poets take part in the fighting?’
    ‘Most of the best ones. Does that shock you?’
    ‘With us a poet may do whatever he pleases so long as he preserves his dignity. Both Fig-bread and myself have taken part in wars. But your sort of warfare appears to have involved loss of life and damage to property as well as other indignities.’
    ‘Naturally. A commander-in-chief’s task is to destroy the armies opposed to him and force the enemy’s government to unconditional surrender.’
    ‘Not at all a pleasant form of warfare. With us, a war is always great fun – apart from the defensive fighting in which our travellers sometimes get involved when they cross the frontier of New Crete – and if anyone were killed we should end it at once.’
    ‘Our wars are altogether hateful.’
    ‘Then is it really true that your armies show no respect for women and children? Surely no poet could kill a woman? That wouldn’t make sense.’
    ‘I never killed one,’ I said lamely. ‘At least, not so far as I know.’
    Another silence followed, broken at last by Fig-bread, who said: ‘Your voice carries unfamiliar undertones. I suppose that life with you is so complex that it’s never easy to speak the truth. When you’re discussing the institutions and events of your age the uncertainty in your voice contrasts strangely with the firm way in which you spoke first – when you said you liked us.’
    ‘Well, we like you too,’ said Sally. ‘Would you care to stay with us a little longer, or do you feel uncomfortable, carried so far ahead of your age?’
    ‘If I could be sure that my absence from home was causing no anxiety, I’d stay for as long as I was welcome.’
    ‘You needn’t worry about that. You’re asleep in your epoch, and at liberty to spend months or years here in a dream lasting no longer than from one breath to the next.’
    ‘Very well; but I shouldn’t like to return and find my house in ruins and my two-year-old son with a long white beard being pushed in a bath-chair.’
    I settled back comfortably and we talked until sunset, when a bell tolled in the distance and candles were lighted. They were made of bees’ wax and set in heavy gold sconces. Somehow I had expected to find a more advanced form of lighting.
    Most people from our epoch would have resented my new friends as altogether too good-looking – physically thoroughbred and with a disconcerting intellectual intensity. They seemed never to have had a day’s illness; their faces were placid and unlined and they looked almost indecently happy. Yet they lacked the quality that we prize as character: the look of indomitability which comes from dire experiences nobly faced and overcome. I tried to picture them confronted with the problems of our age; no, I thought, they would all be haggard and sunken-eyed within a week. Not only did they lack character, which the conditions of their life had not allowed them to develop, they lacked humour – the pinch of snuff that routs the charging bull, the well-aimed custard pie that routs the charging police-constable. For this they had no need, and during the whole of my stay there I heard no joke that was in the least funny. People laughed, of course, but only at unexpectedly happy events, not at other people’s misfortunes. The atmosphere, if it could be acclimatized in an evil epoch like ours, would be described as goody-goody, a word that conveys a reproach of complacency and indifference to the sufferings of the rest of the world. But this happened to be a