Prolepse II : paysage de l’âme & intime requête

Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung further away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

If anyone was to blame it was Vernon. Clive had travelled this line often in the past and had never felt bleak about the view. He couldn't put it down to chewing gum, or a mislaid pen. Their row of the evening before was still sounding in his ears, and he worried that the echoes would pursue him into the mountains and destroy his peace. And it was hardly just a clash of voices he still carried with him, it was growing dismay at his friend's behaviour, and a gathering sense that he had never really known Vernon at all. He turned away from the window. To think, only the week before he had made a most unusual and intimate request of his friend. What a mistake that was, especially now that the sensation in his left hand had vanished completely. Just a foolish anxiety brought on by Molly's funeral.

Amsterdam, III, i