Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 2, July 2000

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London

by

Theo Malekin

He returned, a stranger, to Blake and Milton's land. Eyes accustomed to flat baking farmland rolling to a distant blue horizon, got to know, once again, the crumbling ancient masonry, the madly twisting roads, the brown cosy air, the beery breath and sweat of London. London seemed to him an old man, and it breathed on him. It filled his heart with an unnameable sorrow, a mute yearning. He became hollow inside. He sought to fill the emptiness within him by the friendship of the disaffected who littered London like cigarette wrappers. Always an outsider, he became unreal to himself. Looking in at shop windows, he saw reflected the face of a stranger looking, curious, back. His dreams grew old like the city. Dissolving into the background, another face in London's teeming crowd, one day he disappeared.