Occasion for Loving Read Online Free Page A

incoherent consciousness that had been in the process of coming to birth in her for a year or more, and that perhaps would only be completed at the end of her life, or not at all. How many of the other articles of faith by which she lived were undiscovered dead letters? Is one living, while they remain undiscovered? She felt tired, solitary, and dogged.
    She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, fora while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings—they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.

Two
    The unease that Jessie Stilwell had felt at the idea of the presence of two observers in the house was forgotten. Their presence belonged to the static on the surface of daily living; another voice or two interrogating, another laugh in the garden, another set of footsteps on the stairs. The girl was easily amused, and amused herself; she quickly became friendly with the Stilwells’ friends as well as Boaz’s, and she was in and out of the house, with a word and a telegraphic smile, between one diversion and another. Boaz was in a daze of work, and, if he was in the house, was not seen for hours at a time. Tom was busy and absorbed, a little grimly and reluctantly, sometimes, in his lectures and the life of the university. Jessie, whose current job was that of secretary to an association of African musicians and entertainers, worked every morning at the town office of the Agency, and sometimes in the afternoon or evening as well, and cared for the house and children and the demands of friends in those fits and starts of activity that served quite well to keep them going. In this immediate present—the continuing present of life going on—the Davis couple took a place unobtrusively; on any other level, she was hardly aware of them at all. She remained intact, alone.
    Like many people, Jessie had known a number of different, clearly defined, immediate presents, and as each of these phases of her life had closed by being replaced with another, it had lost reality for her; she no longer had it with her. The ribbon of her identity was always that which was being played out between her fingers; there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people.
    The latest, and present phase—her association with Tom Stilwell, their way of life, their children—she accepted without question as the definitive one (by this, for whatever it turned out to be worth, would her life be known). For the best part of eight years she had lived it honestly, wholly, and even passionately. But for some time now, she had been aware that though this was the way she had chosen to live, and by that fact deserving of all the fervour and singlemindedness and loyalty that she had it in her to put into it, it was not the sum total of her being. Not all the spit and polish of effort, the grace of love could make it so. She was feeling towards the discovery that there is no sum total of being; it flows from what has been, through what is, and so on to what is becoming. She had created herself anew, in eight years, as she had done several times before that; but this self was the creation of man; it did not belong to the stream of creation. From the fullness of life, she had, at last, time to ask herself why she lived, and although she had scarcely begun to know how to formulate the question,