inspo/setting

I cast another glance at Yashka and went out. I did not want to stay—I was afraid to spoil my impression. But the heat was still as unbearable as before. It seemed to hang over the earth in a thick, heavy layer; through the fine, almost black dust, little bright points of light seemed to whirl round and round in the dark blue sky. Everything was hushed; there was something hopeless, something oppressive about this deep silence of enervated nature. I made my way to a hayloft and lay down on the newly mown but already almost dried grass. For a long time I could not doze off; for a long time Yashka’s overpowering voice rang in my ears; but at last heat and fatigue claimed their due and I sank into a deep sleep. When I awoke, it was dark; the grass I had heaped all round me exuded a strong scent and felt a little damp to the touch; through the thin rafters of the half-open roof, pale stars twinkled faintly. I went out. The sunset glow had died away long ago and its last trace could be just distinguished as a pale shaft of light low on the horizon; but through the coolness of the night one could still feel the warmth in the air which had been so glowing-hot only a short while before, and the breast still yearned for a cool breeze. There was no wind, no cloud; the sky all round was clear and translucently dark, quietly shimmering with countless, hardly visible stars. Lights gleamed in the village; from the brightly lit pub nearby came a discordant and confused uproar through which I seemed to recognize Yashka’s voice. At times there were wild bursts of laughter.

We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to their respective machines. But there was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular—films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family which has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprang a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn’t have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.

[...] But on bright summer days, in particular, so evenly disposed a lustre lay over the whole of Barmouth Bay that the separate surfaces of sand and water, sea and land, earth and sky could no longer be distinguished. All forms and colours were dissolved in a pearl-grey haze; there were no contrasts, no shading any more, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged, and strangely--I remember this well--it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity. [...]

March and Maxine go back to the co-opping frenzy of ten or fifteen years ago, when landlords were reverting to type and using Gestapo techniques to get sitting tenants to move. The money they offered was contemptuously little, but some renters went for it. Those who didn’t got a different treatment. Apartment doors removed for “routine maintenance,” garbage uncollected, attack dogs, hired goons, eighties pop played really loud. Maxine noticed March on a picket line of neighborhood gadflies, old lefties, tenants’-rights organizers and so forth, in front of a building over on Columbus, waiting for the union’s giant inflatable rat to show up. Picket-sign slogans included RATS WELCOME—LANDLORD’S FAMILY and CO-OP—CRUEL OFFENSIVE OUTRAGEOUS PRACTICES. Undocumented Colombians carried furniture and household possessions out to the sidewalk, trying to ignore the emotional uproar. [...]

It's beginning to rain, little drops driven sideways across the windowpane. Streaks and dots across the glass. The sky outside is darker and the lights in the car, the ceiling light and the little reading lights over the seats, seem brighter. The farms are passing now. There's no wash hanging out, but I can see the clotheslines stretched between the back porches and the barns. The farms are on both sides of the tracks, there are wide-open spaces between them, the silos far apart over the landscape, with the farm buildings clustered around them, like churches in their little villages in the distance.

THE SUN IS a rich yellow when she wakes up from her nap. Her shoulders and cheeks are heavy, and she lifts herself up on her elbows slowly, as if a sharp gesture might pull her back into full consciousness. The walls are covered in splotchy shadows and diamonds of light. The window feels cold to the touch. She kneels to look out, sees limestone stains on the glass.

But on this Sunday, at peace as soon as the bells stopped banging, this velvet autumn day when the grass was finest and thickest, silky green: before the first frost, and the blood in your lungs is redder than summer air can make it and smarts with oxygen, as if the iron in your system was hungry for it, and the chill was sticking it to you in every breath ... Pop, six feet under, would never feel this blissful sting again. The last of the bells still had the bright air streaming with vibrations.