I am less and less able to listen to the presentations of others, W. notes. He can see it on my face. I can never hide it. At one point, he says I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.
What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don't I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water?
There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the Mersey, when I full intended to catch a ferry, he says. Then there was our aborted Thames trip, the boating expedition all the way upriver ... How disappointed I had been!
Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which there gusts the wind of pure idiocy.
