Beast by Paul Kingsnorth Page B

looked across at the same tree I had been looking at then but I couldn’t imagine how it had stirred those feelings in me. The huge whiteness of the sky curled over me like a dome and seemed to sit with me. Nothing would happen here I knew that now I had known that as soon as I had sat down. Nothing would happen here even I would not happen here. I would only sit in the whiteness with nothing around me. But I felt like I was happy to do that all day and maybe all year. It was so still. Nothing flowed through me or around me. Life was nothing and this was how itshould be I felt as if this was how it should always have been. I would just sit here.
    I had brought no food because I didn’t have any food I only had water now and anyway I still wasn’t hungry. Food seemed like a form of pollution. I drank water and this was fine. Perhaps I sat there for a couple of hours. I knew I would see nothing and I was happy about it. Nothing was fine. Nothing was good. This was how it was meant to be.
    And then it changed suddenly just as it had changed the day before. I took a swig of water from my bottle and I closed its cap and put it down on the ground before me. When I looked up again I saw nothing that I had not seen before and yet none of it looked the same. This time I wasn’t frightened. Instead I felt despair settling slowly and gently down upon me. There was no panic and no urgency. There was nothing to run from. I accepted what I felt almost immediately. But there it was: a gentle, strong, loving despair enveloping me. I felt like the nature of things was laid quietly out before me like the wares on a market stall. For a moment the world cracked open and I saw myself as the wild creature I was as one caged wild creature among billions as atoms as meat as animal as prey. As another small victim the world would not mourn because the worlddid not mourn it just went on. The wheel of blood and sperm and death and life kept turning and none of it needed me none of it knew me for there was no me and never had been. I saw the abyss open up and I knew I would be swallowed by it and I knew that everything in my world everything I was and everything I thought and felt and cared about and refused to care about had been carefully constructed only to help me survive any glimpses I might have of this.
    What was all this? Everything was so silent and still and sad. There was nobody here but me no creature no noise and it seemed clear to me in this moment that it was driving me insane. How could it not drive me insane? The silent hot white place and everything I had been drifting away on the stream so far that I could no longer see it. I accepted it all. It was fine. I had no desire to change it but at the same time I was clear what was going on. It was horrible. I was so alone. I was so alone and that was all there was and would ever be and there was nothing to be done about that now.
    I got up and I turned and walked to the churchyard gate. I walked down the path and I pushed open the church’s wooden door which was ajar. The building was cool and close and immediately I felt different. The despair seemed to be hanging in the air outside likemist. Inside the building it dissipated. I sat on the very last pew at the back of the church and I held my cold water bottle in my hand like a relic like something that connected me to a world I felt I was floating away from. The whiteness came through the stained glass window at me. To make a window like that. To make this altar and these carvings and these windows to make a spire that points to heaven and to put one in every settlement in the land. What did you have to believe to do that and would it dissolve what was hanging in the air? Did beauty dissolve what was hanging in the air could beauty dissolve anything or was that a lie? Did people make windows like that anymore or did art die with God in the twentieth century? If a tower doesn’t point to heaven why build a tower? If your hands are not