LETTER FROM LONDON
THE ENGLAND SCENE
I left New York by air which means that I left without really
departing. Travel doesn't go with transit anymore. It is as if something
happened to you on the spot, altering you without taking you anywhere.
This process has always reminded me of something I learned when I
studied chemistry-the phenomenon of allomorphism. That's what it's
like to travel by jet. You are converted into an allomorph of yourself
without ever really quitting the point of departure. You step into a
sealed vessel, the engines are switched on, the pressure rises and six
hours later, fifteen minutes after you have left, the furnace is tapped
and you've turned from diamond into graphite. Travel has become
transmutation. New impressions bend their way into the mind at an
unfamiliar angle, breaking up into an odd spectrum of feelings and
responses. So that just at the moment of getting back home by air,
at the interface of one's changed self and the once familiar scene, there
are set up all sorts of chromatic aberrations. My first sensa tion, on getting
back to England after two years away had really nothing to do with
the special occasion itself.
The most powerful feelings were those of a more general sort, con–
nected with the abstract condition of arrival. There was a contentless
impression of paradox. Without any specific item contained in the feeling,
I simply felt newly familiar. The palpable and visible objects responsible
for this impression were somehow not given. Both the landscape and the
people seemed weak and wan, at a distance, as such things are, during
convalescence from a serious illness, in that stage of invalid indif–
ference when the mind is empty of objects but flooded with pale nuance.
Then bits of real sensation began to creep back. Everyone suddenly
loomed up big and pink with raw cheeks, irregular teeth and those
grey, uncooked eyes set in brimming lids. Cab drivers were scuttling
helpfully about, in vast baggy trousers and plantigrade, bungy-soled
shoes. The whole airport seemed to be staffed by these
jolis laids.
Then,
as the taxi sped along in the temperate spring sunshine, one saw more
and more
young
people. There were slim, lissome androgyne couples,
