walking in London

And she had been walking and alert all day. The conditions were right, then. First, before the lit space, a terror: but slight, nothing that could overwhelm, less fear than the reluctance to acknowledge her condition of being so alien, or walking always as a watchful critic. This was loneliness? Yes, she supposed so. But if so, what else had she ever known? So that was a gift too: people said "loneliness" speaking of an ultimate dread, and she had once said "loneliness" meaning a blow of fate that might make her alone among her fellow creatures, something that in the future might claim her. But no, since she had been in London, she had been alone, and had learned that she had never been anything else in her life. Far from being an enemy, it was her friend. This was the best thing she had known, to walk down streets interminably, to walk through mornings and afternoons and evenings, alone, not knowing where she was unless she walked by the river, sometimes walking so long she did not even know what part of London she was in, he feet tired, but conscious of strength in their tiredness, her head cool, watchful, alert, waiting for the coming of the visitor, silence. And her heart . . . well, that was the point, it was always her heart that first fought off the pain of not belonging here not belonging anywhere, and then, resisted, told to be quiet, it quietened and stilled. Her heart, as it were, came to heel; and after that, the current of her ordinary thought switched off. Her body was a machine, reliable and safe for walking; her heart and daytime mind were quiet.

-D. Lessing, Four-Gated City


We were in London on Monday. I went to London Bridge. I looked at the river; very misty; some tufts of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great corner all smashed . . . A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by Tube to the Temple; and there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old squares: gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder, something like a builder's yard. Grey dirt and broken windows; sightseers; all that completeness ravaged and demolished.

-V. Woolf, Diaries