WEBVTT

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There's one more with
a European provenance.

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And this is called Human
Wishes, which somebody told me

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Samuel Beckett was going to
call his collected works.

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And the first sentence
is only remarkable

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because if you've
ever lived in England,

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you know it describes
a very rare event.

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This morning the sun rose
over the garden wall,

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and a rare blue sky
leapt from East to West.

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Man is altogether desire,
say the wise Upanishads.

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Worth anything a blue
sky, says Mr. Acker,

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the Shelford gardener.

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Not all together, in the end.

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Last night on television, the
ethnologist and the cameraman

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watched with hushed wonder
while the chimpanzee carefully

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stripped the willow branch,
and with exact hand eye

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coordination, inserted
it into the anthill.

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He desired red ants.

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When they crawled
slowly up the branch,

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he ate them pinched
between his long fingers

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as the zoom lens
enlarged his face.

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Sometimes he stopped to
examine one, thoughtfully,

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as if he were the judge
at an ant beauty contest.

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There was an empty place
in the universe where

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that branch wasn't and
the chimp filled it,

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as my wife, finding no back
on an old Welsh cupboard she

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had bought in Saffron Walden,
imagined one there and imagined

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both the cupboard
and the imagined back

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against the kitchen
wall in Berkeley,

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and went into town looking for
a few boards of 18th century

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tongue and groove pine
to fill that empty space.

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I stayed home to write
or rather stayed home

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and stared at a
sheet of blank paper

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waiting for her to come back
thinking tongue and groove,

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tongue and groove?

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Is a language or a
kind of moral cloud

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chamber through which
the world passed

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and from which it emerged
charged with desire?

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The man in the shop
in Cambridge said

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he didn't have any old pine.

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But when Earlene went back
after thinking about it

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to say she was sure
she had seen some,

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the man found it right under
his feet, which was puzzling.

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Mr. Acker, hearing this story
explained, you know, he said,

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a lot of fiddling goes
on in those places.

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The first time you went
in, the governor was there.

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The second time, he wasn't.

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So the chap sold you some scrap
and he's four quid in pocket.

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No doubt he's having a good time
now with his mates at the pub.

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Or he might have put it on
the horses at Newmarket.

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He might parley
it into a fortune.

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I can't do that accent right.

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It's a very dry accent,
that-- the Cambridgeshire one.