Verslingerd aan Powys (7 en slot)

Ter afronding van deze reeks een fragment uit Wolf Silent dat diepe indruk op me heeft gemaakt en me altijd zal bijblijven. Het betreft een scène waardoor de hoofdpersoon op zijn beurt wordt gebiologeerd. In one of the smaller houses, where for some reason neither curtain nor blind had been drawn, Wolf could see two candles burning on a small table at which someone was still reading. He touched Mr Valley's arm, and both the men stood for a time looking at that unsconscious reader. It was an elderly woman who read there by those two candles, her chin propped upon one arm, and the other arm lying extended across the table. The woman's face had nothing remarkable about it. The book she read was obviously, from its shape and appearance, a cheap story; but as Wolf stared in upon her, sitting there in that commonplace room ad midnight, an indescribable sense of the drama of human life passed through him. For leagues and leagues in every direction the great pastoral fields lay quiet in their muffled, dew-drenched aloofness. But there, by those two pointed flames, one isolated consciousness kept up the old familiar interest, in love, in birth, in death, all the turbulent chances of mortal events. The simple, pallid, spectacled head became for him at that moment a little island of warm human awareness in the midst of the vast non-human night. He thought to himself how, in some future time, when these formidable scientific inventions would have changed the face of the earth, some wayward philosopher like himself would still perhaps watch through a window a human head reading by candlelight, and find such a sight touching beyond words. Mentally he resolved once more, while to Mr Valley's surprise he still lingered, staring in at that candlelit window, that while he lived he would never allow the beauty of things of this sort to be overpowered from him by anything that science could do.

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