Alice’s Dérives in Devonshire

Beginning

Beginning

To satisfy curiosity you must be willing to seem naive, to engage, to explore, to stare and be stared at, and people nowadays seem more willing or able to enter that state elsewhere than at home.

(Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit)

Can a city fall to bits one day and put itself back together the next?

I think so, but I am crazy. So why should you believe me? Dad says it’s OK to be mad. Bad is the problem.

And the city is bad. I saw its badness. For one day its glass was everywhere like broken teeth after a fight between lions and sharks. Big buildings leaning on each other like drunk dinosaurs. The new shopping centre was a cave full of smoke. And everyone was frightened of each other.

But I wasn’t frightened. I could see that between the pieces of glass were shining gaps. And in the biggest building were passageways and tunnels and I could see that that was the good city. The city of holes and caves. Between the bad was the good, but only if you knew that before you looked.

A little while later – I’m not sure how long because that was when I was ill again – the bigger cities burned for real; life had a really bad dream. By then, though, I knew that the cities were always ruins, no matter what they looked like. And that you had to know how to see fire to find warmth.