There's one more with a European provenance.
And this is called Human Wishes, which somebody told me
Samuel Beckett was going to call his collected works.
And the first sentence is only remarkable
because if you've ever lived in England,
you know it describes a very rare event.
This morning the sun rose over the garden wall,
and a rare blue sky leapt from East to West.
Man is altogether desire, say the wise Upanishads.
Worth anything a blue sky, says Mr. Acker,
the Shelford gardener.
Not all together, in the end.
Last night on television, the ethnologist and the cameraman
watched with hushed wonder while the chimpanzee carefully
stripped the willow branch, and with exact hand eye
coordination, inserted it into the anthill.
He desired red ants.
When they crawled slowly up the branch,
he ate them pinched between his long fingers
as the zoom lens enlarged his face.
Sometimes he stopped to examine one, thoughtfully,
as if he were the judge at an ant beauty contest.
There was an empty place in the universe where
that branch wasn't and the chimp filled it,
as my wife, finding no back on an old Welsh cupboard she
had bought in Saffron Walden, imagined one there and imagined
both the cupboard and the imagined back
against the kitchen wall in Berkeley,
and went into town looking for a few boards of 18th century
tongue and groove pine to fill that empty space.
I stayed home to write or rather stayed home
and stared at a sheet of blank paper
waiting for her to come back thinking tongue and groove,
tongue and groove?
Is a language or a kind of moral cloud
chamber through which the world passed
and from which it emerged charged with desire?
The man in the shop in Cambridge said
he didn't have any old pine.
But when Earlene went back after thinking about it
to say she was sure she had seen some,
the man found it right under his feet, which was puzzling.
Mr. Acker, hearing this story explained, you know, he said,
a lot of fiddling goes on in those places.
The first time you went in, the governor was there.
The second time, he wasn't.
So the chap sold you some scrap and he's four quid in pocket.
No doubt he's having a good time now with his mates at the pub.
Or he might have put it on the horses at Newmarket.
He might parley it into a fortune.
I can't do that accent right.
It's a very dry accent, that-- the Cambridgeshire one.