White Light

'Your years of unemployment', says W. I don't speak much of them, either. Years unemployed! I was young then, W. remembers my telling him. Very young. I used to cycle. I would ride about my bike, I told him. I'd have my little pantheistic ecstasies, I told him.

I'd get out old maps and cycle to barrows, or what I took to be barrows, W. says. Doubtless they were only refuse heaps. Doubtless they were only great piles of rubbish abandoned in the woods. And then I'd cycle out all day, mapless, with no particular aim.

Through the new estates, through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, overgrown bridleways and footpaths. The quarried river with its fenced off nature reserves. And above it all, W. remembers my telling him, the blank, indifferent sky. The vast anti-cathedral of the sky.

Later it would make me shiver. Later, feeling exposed, terribly exposed, I'd stay indoors. Didn't I come to fear the day? Ah, but I was young then. Very young. I still had a kind of optimism, which is to say, a blindness in relation to the future. I still had faith in my barrows and my Roman roads.

I could carry my bike over railway bridges. I cycled through glades of tree stumps left by foresters. I cycled through golf courses, banks of green grass beneath sprinklers. I followed the private road through the plantation, and the course of the stream as it temporarily emerged from its culvert.

I was a king of the scrappy woodland along the railway, king of the new estates. The white light hadn't eaten into my soul yet, had it? The white light hadn't eaten me away.