Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much
to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation
of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to
my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. I am going out for a look round.
Coming?"
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting
adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the
hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I
was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a
ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as
the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a
moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the
town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We
could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At
the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at
midnight a pair of white gloves which made his big hands extremely
noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding
forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned.
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