night. Not physically, not normally, anyway. Just thinking about girls was enough: if I thought about girls for too long, I’d have to be out there again, walking across the Suspension Bridge and looping back down to the river, or crossing the river at the lock gate and climbing to the downs. Often I would take the wild hairpinning path that led to the foot of the gorge, sometimes going down thatway, at other times using it to make a breathless ascent. Sometimes, normally when in company, I would visit the Venturers, the all-night café, drink pints of tea, eat bacon sandwiches and observe the clientele of sleepy drivers and preternaturally wakeful drug-users. Sometimes police cars stopped me on my walks, for such activities, though not illegal, were unseemly to the policemanly mind. I would answer their questions politely enough, and then walk on, up the endless hills of Clifton and down the sweeping descents.
Invariably, the act of walking, the exposure to places a little wilder than the floor of my flat or the floor of other people’s flats, than the bed in my flat or the beds in others people’s flats, would calm my mind. Walking is not an aid to thought: it is an aid to thoughtlessness. It is as near as the Western world gets to meditation: walking brings a mindlessness which can soothe in times of trouble, and into which important matters sometimes leap all unexpected .
But I was talking about girls. I remember a line about love from somewhere: “Today was happy until luncheon”. All the anxieties of a bad yet necessary love seem caught up in these few words: the anxiety when things are going badly, the still greater anxiety when things are going well. Sometimes love seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with joy: it is a state of uninterrupted worry, a constant sense of needling nagging failure, a feeling of never beingquite up to the demands imposed, an ache in which physical desire seems to play almost no part at all. At other times, you find yourself involved for no reason that you can explain to yourself: a love affair that seems to have been embarked on solely out of a desire to pursue one’s education, to find out what you are like and what women are like. It is customary to try and paint the picture of the love life of one’s youth as one long round of orgiastic excess. For the most part, so far as I remember, such set-pieces played a relatively minor role. More often, love was a matter of exploration and confusion, error and counter-error , every manoeuvre made more complex by the lack of any notion whatsoever about what life is all about and what either of us or any of us wanted to do in it.
Ashton Court lies on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge: just walk past Burwalls and keep going. It was a splendid, dramatically undulating piece of parkland, of the kind I was later to find mirrored in the African savannah: open grass punctuated by imposing trees, their lower branches and leaves trimmed in a straight line by the creatures that inhabited the place. A browse-line , it is called: and different creatures produce the same effect in different places. In Africa, it’s antelope. And Ashton Court, with its different browsing creatures, was not without a certain magic. The shadowy beauties of the landscape were fine and impressive: and it was an incomparable joy to have these big spaces, these giant trees, formy own. It was a personal Eden, but I never had any thoughts of playing Adam and Eve there. Did I suggest this walk, this desperate venture, late one evening? Or did she? Either way, it was the spiritual possibilities of the place that drew us there, and it was the spiritual ones that sustained us when we arrived. We crossed the Suspension Bridge, the lights of the town below us, the river far beneath. We were unstoned. We passed Burwalls: I could see the balcony of Room Six, from which one could greet the dawn. We reached the place I knew well, where the wall dipped and there was a
Invariably, the act of walking, the exposure to places a little wilder than the floor of my flat or the floor of other people’s flats, than the bed in my flat or the beds in others people’s flats, would calm my mind. Walking is not an aid to thought: it is an aid to thoughtlessness. It is as near as the Western world gets to meditation: walking brings a mindlessness which can soothe in times of trouble, and into which important matters sometimes leap all unexpected .
But I was talking about girls. I remember a line about love from somewhere: “Today was happy until luncheon”. All the anxieties of a bad yet necessary love seem caught up in these few words: the anxiety when things are going badly, the still greater anxiety when things are going well. Sometimes love seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with joy: it is a state of uninterrupted worry, a constant sense of needling nagging failure, a feeling of never beingquite up to the demands imposed, an ache in which physical desire seems to play almost no part at all. At other times, you find yourself involved for no reason that you can explain to yourself: a love affair that seems to have been embarked on solely out of a desire to pursue one’s education, to find out what you are like and what women are like. It is customary to try and paint the picture of the love life of one’s youth as one long round of orgiastic excess. For the most part, so far as I remember, such set-pieces played a relatively minor role. More often, love was a matter of exploration and confusion, error and counter-error , every manoeuvre made more complex by the lack of any notion whatsoever about what life is all about and what either of us or any of us wanted to do in it.
Ashton Court lies on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge: just walk past Burwalls and keep going. It was a splendid, dramatically undulating piece of parkland, of the kind I was later to find mirrored in the African savannah: open grass punctuated by imposing trees, their lower branches and leaves trimmed in a straight line by the creatures that inhabited the place. A browse-line , it is called: and different creatures produce the same effect in different places. In Africa, it’s antelope. And Ashton Court, with its different browsing creatures, was not without a certain magic. The shadowy beauties of the landscape were fine and impressive: and it was an incomparable joy to have these big spaces, these giant trees, formy own. It was a personal Eden, but I never had any thoughts of playing Adam and Eve there. Did I suggest this walk, this desperate venture, late one evening? Or did she? Either way, it was the spiritual possibilities of the place that drew us there, and it was the spiritual ones that sustained us when we arrived. We crossed the Suspension Bridge, the lights of the town below us, the river far beneath. We were unstoned. We passed Burwalls: I could see the balcony of Room Six, from which one could greet the dawn. We reached the place I knew well, where the wall dipped and there was a
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