He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters ... Why aren't our souls restored as we wander out to Jericho? This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Because our day is a mockery of the Sabbath; it laughs at it. Because our day is the day that unmade the Lord ...
Ah, what do we know of rest, real rest, as would come after real work?, W. says. What of righteous tiredness, of the satisfaction of a good job done? Not that we're lazy - not that he's lazy, at any rate, but we don't know how to begin.
W. dreams of smoothing down a page, picking up his pen, and writing - what? What is he supposed to write? Sometimes he dreams it has been revealed to him, the secret of the universe. He wakes, scrawls down some notes, but in the morning? Nothing, just nonsense, W. says.
We need a realitatpunkt, W, says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But all he can be certain of is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.
Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by reality, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it.
Still, it's good to be out of the city, we agree over our pints. Why, almost as soon as we arrive in Oxford, do we try to escape it? But the answer is obvious. What do we see that others do not? It's finished, it's all finished, and never more so than there: in Oxford (though Jericho, too, is in Oxford, the periphery to its centre).
The sky has become a great door shut against us. And the earth, too, is a shut door. We live in two dimensions, not three. Our world is a thin film, a kind of stain to be rubbed away. And it will be rubbed away.
And in the meantime, our non-Sabbath, our parody of rest. Meanwhile, our pints, and pint after pint. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. Consider the idiots of Jericho, how they drink ...