_Albuquerque, N. M._
The long trip home is done. The wars are far distant, and over the
desert there hangs an infinity of space and time that seems put here to
prohibit any contemplation of giant struggles far away.
It is so quiet out here just at dawn. I don’t know what, but something
awakens us--the silence or the gentleness--something awakens us just at
daybreak. And we get up, and watch the light come softly over the bare
Sandias to the east, and it is a perfect hour. The little birds hop
from the sage-filled mesa at daylight, and they come over into our yard
and they peck in the fresh earth, and waddle around and sing and have a
wonderful time.
The friendly hot sun makes its arc across the peaceful sky, and evening
is here. We have a window which looks to the west, and every evening
I sit there and watch. Just as the sun touches the horizon its gold
radiates upward onto the hanging clouds above, and the unearthly long
line of the mesa rim turns into a silhouette and the old volcano peaks
stand silently black in their filament of fire, and all out and on
beyond, everywhere, is the gentle rolling vastness of the desert. What
you see then from our west window is something completely enthralling,
something that is big, and finer than any words.
All this is here for us to relish, so lovely and beautiful and serene.
But when we sit in our west window at sundown it is past midnight
in London, and the guns are going and the bombers are raising hell
and my friends of yesterday are tense and full of a distracting
excitement--peering, listening, alert to death and the sounds of death.
Out here, so remote from turmoil, the ghostly rustle of a falling
bomb can surely be only something you dreamed once in a nightmare.
There can be no truth in it. And yet you know. Day and night, always
in your heart, you are still in London. You have never really left.
For when you have shared even a little in the mighty experience of
a compassionless destruction, you have taken your partnership in
something that is eternal. And amidst it or far away, it is never out
of your mind.