The Western Canon

For more notebook entries, see:
The day I went for a walk with Montaigne in a French village
I watched Cain kill Abel

(From the notebook: August, 2025).

The temperature rose as I walked along Carmen Avenue, flanked by the swaying palm trees from which I caught a resinous, woody smell. The Texan air was crisp and dry, yet it seldom (which was part of its strange magic) overwhelmed you. Rather, the shivering honeysuckle and mesquite and acacia, when the wind blew through it, gave off an air of something exquisite and exuberant—it was spellbinding, really. Every Texan seemed to know this, and to know that they knew it, and to know that it needed no grandiloquence or a poet’s quatrain, for it was theirs. It was hardly in concordance with the view of the stiff-necked Texan, a stereotype I had met but rarely. Even when traversing the most deserted, barren, sand-riddled stretches which, to the eyes of the foreigner—I am not naïve, I was just such a foreigner—seemed a world from which all hope had vacated and where nothing save some peculiar-shaped cacti or wildflower trembled, had the native Texan sink deep into a state I would call either “euphoria” or perhaps an “ecstasy”. Heavens knows, despite having been a Lone Star resident for some three years, I still could not find it in my disposition, much as I had wanted and tried, to still my personality under that vast Texan sky. I seemed but to disappear, like a dustball in a cathedral. And so I had to content myself with watching, not the alien desert, but rather the native Lone Star inhabitant—sitting in a foldable chair, crosslegged, sipping Shiner Bock, while a tranquility seemed to emanate from his eyes—watch with respect and honour, and to accept I would never come to penetrate the riddles of his unruffled nature. ‘Stop, pause, listen.’ He seemed to whisper. ‘Walk and wonder. Wander and loaf. You might just hear the thousand tripping echoes of crickets nowhere to be seen; hear horse-hooves roll over the pavement; hear the distant lulling humming of the sparsely-vegetated creek. . .’

In the gentle surge of heat I made my way home. I walked to Sable Ridge Lane via Carmen Avenue which, unusually, was all deserted and silent. Where was the thin, amplifying whine of trucks? Where were the Texan retirees leading their heat-stilled, purely contemplative life? Where were the dogs rummaging the gardens? I did see two plump boys, fishing in the resaca from a wooden pier, but as they saw me—and looked at me with an air of surprise and shock—they disappeared among the slanting palm trees studding the muddy plot. Then I heard the distinctive chopping of two helicopters, making their way towards San Antonio. Silence followed, a deep hush. I went quietly into the passage that led to my apartment when, stalking past the thin-stemmed eucalyptuses, the bushes of sage and clusters of marigold and scrubbed stepping-stones, I heard the church bells toll from beyond the rooftops. From the staircase by which I entered my apartment block, I saw, on the palmie hill, each bell swinging in turn. More: the front doors, which had hitherto been cross-barred and padlocked fast—for the church had not been open for a decade—were swung wide open. People, dozens of them, were making their way up the gravelled road, and disappeared into the sanctuary. It made me wince a little, truly, as if the sight, which I had never seen before, were a revisit of some recent apparition. I looked about me: the clear stream of sunlight filtered through the trees and the wind swept along without a sound. Odd. I had in that moment such a consciousness of having been there before, exactly there, on that white-washed staircase overlooking the Texan fields, hills and brush; confronted with the church’s ringing, that the déjà‑vu was almost palpable. 

I decided then, on a whim, to pursue.

The bells’ tolling came trickling down onto the steep, pecan-scented path, as I approached the curious church building, erected in miscellaneous stone: basalt, lime, granite, and marble. Old cracked slabs that looked fit to collapse at any moment. Unkempt grass grew around its base, flower-strewn and brimming with desert-crickets. Under the pendant shadows of pecans and cedars stood the faded tombstones, on which softly crept fanning creepers. Entering through the open front doors, flapping in the wind, I sat on the nearest church bench, rubbing the acid out of my thighs. The nave was perfectly covered in wind-blown sand and the altar, a great lump of wood, erected three or so feet, had a hat of bird-droppings. Over the course of mere minutes, all benches were occupied by serene-looking Texans, and soon the sanctuary was brimming with people crowding the isle, most of whom looked excited, even anticipatory.

Then came a frail wavering spear of a shadow, from somewhere behind the altar, emerging against the concavity of faded stone. Two shin-sized wax candles twinkled through the dull and hazy air, like lanterns in a seam of cloud. Then up onto a wooden box, placed behind the altar, rose Father Williams: tall, sinewy and thin as a spear of grass. He had a face at once erudite and pointy-featured, rather like—forgive me the comparison—that of Erasmus. And like Erasmus he seemed both self-collected and self-confident, and he had an air of a supreme but self-composed intellect. In other words, he was an enigma. He then began talking—to quote Dante—”talking of things which were fitting for that place and of which it is well now to be silent.”