Inside Out 2037

Extract

Monsignor Bosco Chang felt cold and stiff and tired. He could not but compare this lumbering progress from the English coast, shaken and jolted in the clumsy coach along the rutty roads, with the ease and speed of travel in China, either by air or through the new compressor tubes, where you stepped into a private padded carriage, dialled your destination, and were shot there at 700 kilometres an hour. Why, one morning he had consulted the voice records at the great central phonary of Nanking, lunched with his friend from seminary days the Vicar-General of Honan-Fu, seen his publishers at Canton in the afternoon, and started his retreat that very evening at the great Manresa in the Snowy Mountains on the borders of Tibet. So little friction, he reflected, so little distraction; the mind could concentrate and the will fix its desire on the Simple Sheer, unworried by the multitude of little things. But here one was so close to time and space, to all the trivial quantitative modalities of being; to soft and hard and sore and wet, the fleas, the cold, the grit, the shaking; congested veins and broken finger nails, the smell of a drink that lingered in the breath of the natives, sour and yet touched with the sweetness of chrysanthemums decaying in the late autumnal gardens round Ko-Hoa. And their minds and speech, so definite and slow, with the edges of a chunk of Cartesian matter and the labourings of an ox before the plough; their nerves, too, like so much muscle and bone.