It is strange that spring has never seemed to me a happy time. It is too poignant. Poignant for me and Cornelius because, although we never speak of it, I know that he must, like me, feel a pang that everything around us is being born again … every old tree is putting out frail, fresh, tiny new leaves, but we cannot be renewed. We cannot be born again. We have begun an inexorable descent. It is the one thing I cannot talk about with Cornelius. Sometimes I am frightened—frightened of what the end will be. Then I think of Jane and remember how intensely she lived till the very end, and how wisely! She gave up everything not essential, but she kept the essential. So till the end she could look at a mushroom or a bird or an autumn leaf with total joy. Dear God, I say to myself, remind us to pay attention. This it is in the power of the very old to do. For them too, just as for the very young, life can still be full of miracles—and a miracle is a stone with a special color, or a flat fungus growing out of a tree trunk. But for that one must not allow oneself to get cluttered up.

It is odd that I have begun to pray again after many, many years when prayer did not mean a great deal to me. I have no intimate sense of God’s presence, but somehow when I can pray, I feel transparent again. Light flows through me. I am no longer a thick substance composed of lists of things to do, small anxieties, pains. I wonder whether this is what Joel means by “Being Now”? That thought just occurred to me.

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Nick and Joel had decided to go on a last walk, deep into the woods to a place where Nick thought there might be beavers, but for once he had taken a false bearing and instead they came out at mid-morning near to a hardtopped road that wound along an artificial pond.

“I could do with a pause,” Joel said. He didn’t like to admit that he was dead tired, but the rough walk, over old stone walls and for a time along a brook, the pushing branches back, the uneven footing, and Nick’s pace had about done him in. “I’m out of breath,” he said, sitting down on a round piece of granite.… “I suppose this rock got smoothed out by the glacier.”

While he sat and felt the sun on his back and took in the pale blue shimmer of the water, Nick wandered off and began poking under leaves along the bank. After a time he came back with a small bunch of arbutus in his hand and sat down silently beside Joel.