What heals pain? Time, the old wiseacres respond. You know better. You are wise enough to know that time does not always heal pain. The conventional image of the amatory bonfire, the eyeball-drying flame which dies to sad ashes, needs adjusting. Try instead a hissing gas-jet that scorches if you will but also does worse: it gives light, jaundicing, flat-showed and remorseless, the sort of light that catches an old man on a provincial platform as the train pulls out, a valetudinarian who watches a yellow window and a twitching hand withdraw from his life, who walks after the train a few paces as it curves into invisibility, who fixes his eye upon the red lamp of the guard's wagon, holds on that until it is less than a ruby planet in the night sky, then turns away and finds himself still beneath a platform lamp, alone, with nothing to do except wait out the hours in a musty hotel, convincing himself he has won while knowing truly he has lost, filling his sleeplessness with cosy if-onlies, and then return to the station and stand alone once more, in kinder light but to make a crueller journey, back along those thirty miles he had travelled with her the previous night.


So Mr Novelist Barnes,
If I asked you 'What is Life?', you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence.
So, the question remains, What sort of coincidence?
S.W.