Modernism Has Metastasized in My Mind

This is a story about being out in the cold. And fittingly, albeit arbitrarily, it begins in winter, proceeds leapfrogging from one winter to another, and ends in this more or less sodden summer during which the pages of the books I have read – unless they are electronic ones – have seemed to fox beneath my fingertips, super-saturated as they've been with a very English atmosphere. This is a story about exile – not a dramatic, physical exercise to a real Siberia, but an internal exile, a driving out of a human awareness from a place of relative psychic safety, to one where all bets are off and anything may happen. A place – to expand the definition of place itself – where up may be down, and the solitary wanderer in a sea of fog observes, horrified, as its dank clouds and sinister volutes are inexorably modelled by the soughing winds into a likeness of his own anguished face.