September 11, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

Yesterday evening I and James walked down to the Mall where we watched the crimson sun sinking into the distant blue hills setting the parchment of the sky alight with streaks of fiery orange. As I stood there, the cold wind blowing in from the west, my thoughts went back to my Uncle Aaron. It is only today as I grow older and older that I begin to realise how deep an influence, even unknown to myself, my two uncles, Timothy and Aaron, have subtly exercised on myself. About Uncle Timothy I have written about elsewhere on these pages, and is to Uncle Aaron that I turn today.
And yet why do I bother writing about them? I do not really know. Perhaps it is with a sense of gratitude for what they have taught me in the very attempt to unteach me of what I had absorbed. For it is indeed the case that such is the nature of the views of men like Uncle Timothy and Uncle Aaron that they cannot, without contradicting themselves, express their own thoughts in the first person. They need must enlist the help of a third person who shall struggle, even if only to fail in the attempt, to throw some light on minds that are impenetrable, first and foremost to themselves.
Dear Mama was of course devoted to both her elder brothers, but I fancy that it was always towards my eldest Uncle Aaron that she always directed her fondest affections. I remember Uncle Aaron from the four months that he came and lived with us when we were in the East End. He had a face so austere that it seemed to me that it was like a mask that the wind of a thousand years had hewn out of a solid granite cliff. And yet oftentimes when I would talk to him I would feel that that wall was about to dissolve into the thousand pieces out of which it had been painfully wrought.
Uncle Aaron spent almost the whole day reading, starting immediately after breakfast. He started with the newspapers, firstly the London Times and some others which came in from Scotland, and would then move on to the newspapers from Paris and Berlin. There was no shortage of newspapers in my father's house and Uncle Aaron relished the mornings with us meticulously reading each newspaper from the first page to the last in between cups of coffee. He would then pick up books from the bygone ages, starting with the seventeenth century, moving on to the eighteenth and coming down to our own times, to the very decade and the very year. In the evenings, he would go out for his long walks, in the same black coat that he always wore, even when it had started to stink mildly.
Once I was sitting in the living room as he was going out in the evening.
'Victoria', he said in his smile that somehow always reminded me of Uncle Timothy, 'if this whole world is a Text, I am but a reader. In the mornings, I read the Texts of my newspapers and books, and in the evenings the Texts of people's faces, their gestures, their silences, their erasures, and their words.'
Thus he spent his days with us, waking up at the exact hour and going up to bed just as the clock began to strike twelve.
'Efficiency', he once declared to us,'What marks us out, we the British nation, over the other races, is our attention to detail and our craving for order. A handful of British soldiers can rule over a thousand natives. No, not because we have the gunpowder. Even they can buy it from us, if they wanted to. We are superior because we are efficient. But there is something else to be said in this matter, of course. Something much more ominous. Something about how this dream for self-mastery is the perfect illusion that men suffer from.'
That was a habit of Uncle Aaron that always irritated me, breaking off a train of thought just when you thought he was finally reaching at something.

[Editor's note : 'I' abruptly breaks off the narrative at this point.]