falling…(70) but having grown old we still act as if we had remained young inside in old age

‘i will explain the motion by which the generative bodies of matter give birth to various things, and , after they are born, dissolve them once more…..’ Lucretius …The office is on the twenty first floor, there are forty eight landings and flights of stairs, you have no idea how many floors there are in the building. You moved down from the north a few months ago on getting the appointment. It is an early evening in high summer, after 8pm but still light. We are looking out of the window to the west and waiting for the sun to almost set. A climber passes by edging there way carefully up the grid to the right of your window, they smile at you and wave. Shortly afterwards their partner follows them, you think they look slightly more confident as they acknowledge your hello. We are waiting for the 8.30 security guard as she will be the last guard of the evening, the cleaners went through cleaning the floor at 6.30. I am eating the remains of the salad from the coffee bar. You have not decided whether to take your sleeping bag up to the roof to sleep tonight in the lea of the giant water tank or whether to open the window of the office and sleep on the carpeted floor….When you arrived in London you imagined that you would get a room, a flat perhaps in the East of the city. Having been told by your parents and friends that was where people migrated too, that it was where you’d find a place to live. Instead you have an office and a roof to sleep on, and a man who occasionally comes to visit you to talk and sleep with you and at weekends you stay with him in a flat in Dover Square. Years will pass before you can explain why it is you didn’t live with him in the flat at that moment, children will be born, governments will fall, years of psychoanalysis will pass, topologies change and papers published explaining the end of a dominant ideological trope, only then in the depths of the suburban countryside will you be able to explain why. In this moment though as the sun moves to the right and your face is warmed by the late evening rays, such thoughts are far away in the distant future. …Falling bodies pass the window. As the bodies pass its impossible to tell which form of falling it is, whether it is the continuous downward fall of (bodies)atoms, each moving at the same speed and in the same direction, or if its the kind of movement that encompasses the collision of atoms (bodies) (plagae) which causes vortices and compound bodies of matter to develop on a macroscopic scale. That is, they become fused into the elementary building blocks which give rise to matter and life ‘being driven into closer union and held there by the entanglement of their interlocking shapes..’ The third is the clinamen or the swerve, which Lucretius so perfectly describes as a spontaneous and infinitesimally small change of direction in the course of an atom’s downward fall. The fluidity of the downward fall appearing by chance in the laminar flow. The importance of this minute deviation, the indirection cannot be overestimated: ‘If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like raindrops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.’ The falling bodies pass the window, their bodies catching the onset of turbulence within the laminar flow, which they caused with the minute unseen gesture as they leaned forward, the even downward flow of atoms, their arms and legs They catch the thermal updraft, the photons from the sun warming the air on the side of the building, they glide away from the building, slowing their descent along the long curve that crosses Millbank and out over the river, towards the waiting boat, the first person lands in the river and is hauled onto the boat as the second lands gently and perfectly on the deck of the boat. The boat zooms off upriver, vanishing under the bridges, chaos bubbling in their wake… ‘…oh…’ She puts her arm around him glad for the moment that they have collided rather than swerved. The collision of atoms watching the consequences of the swerve…

five decades later he remembers this as he drives past the building and watches others climb and remembers that moment, parking he stands watching and remembering indifferent to the fact he’ll never be late for an interview again.