HUNGRY TO HEAR

Hungry to hear (like Jew-faces, kind but anticipating pain) they sit, their ears raw. The conversation remains genteel, of motor cars: her brother bought a car, he was having a six months’ vacation from an Indian post, he should have known better than to buy an American car, the value depreciates so, and she (his sister) should not have lent it to her (her friend) even though it wasn’t her fault that the car only did fifteen miles to the gallon after she returned it. A clear situation like this, in which life is easy to understand, is cruel to them. It leaves no scratches in the mind around which opinions, sympathies, silly repetitions can fester and breed dreams and other remote infections—too remote always to give serious pain. They long to be fumbled, to have confusion and uncertainty make a confused and uncertain end of them. There they sit, having pins-and-needles of obscurity which they mistake for sensation. They open their newspapers: ‘I suppose it is foolish to spend all this time reading newspapers? They are lying and dishonest and devoted to keeping a certain portion of the population in ignorance and intellectual slavery? Or is it foolish to take it so seriously? I shall go on reading them out of sophistication?...’ Oh, go to hell.