Some remarks

GEORGE SHERBAN to SHARMA PATEL

I have read your letter very carefully. I will see you during my visit to India and I will tell you then why I will not allow myself to be put forward, as you suggest. But Sharma, I did tell you, I explained everything to you.

I have been dreaming. Would you like to hear my dream?
There was a civilisation once - where? - it doesn't matter. The Middle East perhaps, China, India... It lasted a long long time. Thousands of years. We can't think like that now: continuity, cultures not changing very much, generation after generation. It was a civilisation where there were rich and poor, but not great extremes. It was well balanced, too, trade and agriculture, and the use of minerals, all in harmony with each other. People lived a long time, perhaps a thousand years. Perhaps five hundred. But it doesn't matter, a long time. Of course now we despise the past and think that children were mostly born to die because of ignorance. But these people were not ignorant. They knew how not to have too many children and to live at peace with their land, and their neighbours.
Imagine what a marriage might have been then, Sharma. Nothing frantic and desperate, no fear of death as we all have it, making us rush to mate and marry and the having and holding because we know that everything may so suddenly be taken away.
And lifetimes stretching in front of you... a young man may have parents two hundred years old, think of that Sharma, how sensible and experienced they must be... he sees this marriage, and its strength and its sense, and he knows he wants the same. And there is a girl like him. They may have known each other all their lives. Or have heard of each other, for there is plenty of time to hear of this one and that one - to listen to someone growing up nearby, and to wonder, would we be right with each other? But there is no hurry, no rush, no desperation. Behind them stretches their civilisation, and the wise men and the historians and the storytellers tell them of it, and in front of them stretches their world, and will go on and on...
But marriages are made young, of course, for that is the time for marriage. The families make slow and thoughtful approaches to each other. What they are thinking of is how they can carry the best they know into the future of the race, their culture. They see themselves, feel themselves, as the bearers of culture. Yes, they discuss family characteristics - this is a good family, the mother is good and balanced and beautiful enough, and the father is also these things, and his line too. When these young people know these things are being discussed, it is not with a sense of personal affront, which is how we would, now, in these days, experience a discussion about - not our wonderful and precious selves - but our importance as representatives. When they meet, it is without panic and grasping. They talk and they visit and they wait and they get to know each other's families, and all this may take a long time, years even, for there is no hurry. And they know that if they decide not to marry, then in any case they will be friends for so long they cannot see the end of it. Meanwhile they love, of course, and choose how they may live, in this place or that, he will work at this or that, and she too, and all the time their children are implicit in what they say and think and do, for the knowledge of how to keep a strong, continuous healthy civilisation is the deepest thing in them.
Can we even begin to imagine, in our feverishness, our consumption of possibilities, the slow, full texture of their days, their years?
They marry, when the time has come for it. What is he? A merchant perhaps and she will travel with him and work with him, or a farmer? A maker of artefacts, these two, tiles, household vessels, everything satisfying and good in their hands, and to look at. Or they will choose to live in a house near their bakery, or is it a leather goods shop, or is he a carpenter, or does he work with metals. What they do with their hands brings them satisfaction, pleasure, every gesture they make must have use, and necessity. There is no hurry. No fear. Of course people die, but after long lives. Of course there are accidents and even, sometimes wars, but these are skirmishes along the edges of their civilisation, bordering another just as fine and old as their own. There is respect between these two cultures, and often marriage and much trading.
This couple have their children and educate them and they are absorbed into the stream of inheritance which carries them like a river. I can see these two young things - like us, Sharma - in love, and loving, but not in the service of some "cause," and not grabbing love as a shield against horrors. Which is what we are doing, Sharma. They are kind, and playful... I can see them doing simple pleasant things like walking along a riverbank, and swimming naked in fresh good water with their friends. And visiting each other's houses, visiting friends. Can you imagine what friendship must have been like in those days? Now our friends are usually in another continent, or are going to move away next week. I like to think of what friendship must have been then.
And I can see these two with their young children, enjoying them, enjoying every minute, because there is not the sort of pressure we know. And watching how they grow and show this trait or that, show the past which they are carrying into the future.
And I can see them, still young people, very young, a hundred, two hundred years old, vigorous and lively, and their family is grown and self-supporting but not flown as we take for granted must happen. Imagine the relations between children and parents who may know each other for hundreds of years? I wonder what kind of bond that might be. Imagine, it might take three hundred years or more for a person to reach maturity. You can think about it, and think about it all and not really grasp it, it is too hard for us. The high marriage. A real marriage. It happened once, I am sure of that.
Do you like this dream, Sharma? I wonder...
Or, if you don't, how about this... we are back in time, back, back... people are physically very different from these I have just written about, and of course different from us, with our diseases and our degenerating organs and our pitiful little lives.
That was a time when this earth had close links with the stars and their forces... does this annoy you, Sharma? You probably think it not useful. You are a very practical girl, and I admire you for it. Any situation offered to you - in no time you have grasped it, summed it up, seen how it may develop into the future. It is a capacity rooted in the deepest part of your nature - you value the capacity but not what it is rooted in! There isn't anything I value in you I could tell you about, and you would be pleased! Do you know that? Isn't that amazing? You think I value what you value in yourself - your cleverness, your ability to manage situations, your brilliant sensible speeches, the way you are so concise and quick in committees. Even your humanity... Do you know, you would be angry, it I told you what I love to see in you... it is a marvellous grasping of the actual, a sense, a gift, an instinct, I watch you pick up a bowl of rice and your hands have in them a language of understanding. You put up your hand to adjust your sari. I could watch that gesture forever. It has such certainty in it, such knowledge. One of the children come running, and it is not what you say, but how you touch and hold. It is a miracle, this thing in you. I can never have enough of it, I watch you, how you put your feet on the earth, so absolutely right, every step, and the movement of your head as you turn it to listen. I tell you, Sharma, there is something there that I - I simply give up! I salute it, and that's all.
In those days of this other older dream of mine, there were few people on the earth. These people who did live here knew what their lives were for. Because we don't, we have no idea at all. They existed to keep life flowing into this planet. It was they who regulated the cosmic forces, powers, currents, so many, and so different, and all with their patterns and flows and rhythms. The lives of these people were regulated, every minute, by their knowledge. But this did not mean a clockwork regularity, which is how we have to think and feel, but a moving with, and through, these always changing flows of the currents.
When a man and a woman married, it was not "to have children" or "to make a family," not necessarily, though of course children had to be born and when they were, it was exact and chosen. No, these two would be chosen, or choose each other, for they were born with the knowledge of how to do this - because they were complementary, and this was judged always by how they stood in relations to stars, planets, the dance of the heavens, the forces of the earth, the moon, our sun. It was not even that they chose each other, rather that they were chosen by what they were, where they were. When they "married" - and we cannot even begin to guess how that seemed to them - their being together was a sacrament, in the sense that everything contributed to the harmony. And when they mated, this was a sacrament, in the true and real sense, used consciously and exactly to adjust, fuel, add to, lessen, powers and currents. And what they ate was the same. And what they wore. There could not be disharmony, because they were harmony. Everything, their thoughts and movements... they were suspended, on this earth, between earth and heaven, and through them flowed the lives of stars, and through them flowed the substance of the earth to the stars...
That was how marriage was then, Sharma. I can see your face as you read this.
I must end now. My personal life has been sad recently. My father and mother died. They were wonderful people. There are family problems.
I will see you soon.