These people do not know it, out of mercy we have never told them; but their lives lack interest at three o’clock—we do not want them, they must let us be.
They have some knowledge for the morning, some for afternoon, more for sunset, much for night; but at three o’clock they bore us, they must leave us be! They do not understand the thousand lights and weathers of the day as we; light is just light to them, and morning morning, and noon noon. They do not know the thing that comes and goes—the way light changes, and the way things shift; they do not know how brightness changes in the sun, and how man’s spirit changes like a flick of light. Oh, they do not know, they cannot understand, the life of life, the joy of joy, the grief of grief unutterable, the eternity of living in a moment, the thing that changes as light changes, as swift and passing as a swallow’s flight; they do not know the thing that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of Spring, the sharp and tongueless cry!
They do not understand the joy and horror of the day as we can feel it; they do not understand the thing we dread at this hour of the afternoon.
To them the light is light, the brief hour passing; their soaps-suds spirits do not contemplate the horror of hot light in afternoon. They do not understand our loathing of hot gardens, the way our spirits dull and sicken at hot light. They do not know how hope forsakes us, how joy flies away, when we look at the mottled torpor of hot light on the hydrangeas, the broad-leaved dullness of hot dock-weeds growing by the barn. They do not know the horror of old rusty cans filled into gaps of rubbish underneath the fence: the loathing of the mottled, hot, and torpid light upon a row of scraggly corn; the hopeless depth of torpid, dull depression which the sight of hot coarse grasses in the sun can rouse to a numb wakefulness of horror in our souls at three o’clock.
It is a kind of torpid stagnancy of life, it is a hopelessness of hope, a dull, numb lifelessness of life! It is like looking at a pool of stagnant water in the dull torpor of the light of three o’clock. It is like being where no green is, where no cool is, where there is no song of unseen birds, where there is no sound of cool and secret waters, no sound of rock-bright, foaming waters; like being where no gold and green and sudden magic is, to be called out to do little things at three o’clock.
Ah, Christ, could we make speech say what no speech utters, could we make tongue speak what no tongue says! Could we enlighten their enkitchened lives with a revealing utterance, then they would never send us out to do a little thing at three o’clock.
We are a kind that hate clay banks in afternoon, the look of cinders, grimy surfaces, old blistered clapboard houses, the train yards and the coaches broiling on the tracks. We loathe the sight of concrete walls, the fly-speckled windows of the Greek, the strawberry horror of the row of lukewarm soda-pop. At this hour of the day we sicken at the Greek’s hot window, at his greasy frying plate that fries and oozes with a loathsome sweat in the full torpor of the sun. We hate the row of greasy frankfurters that sweat and ooze there on the torpid plate, the loathsome pans all oozing with a stew of greasy onions, mashed potatoes, and hamburger steaks. We loathe the Greek’s swart features in the light of three o’clock, the yellowed pock-marked pores that sweat in the hot light. We hate the light that shines on motor cars at three o’clock, we hate white plaster surfaces, new stucco houses, and most open places where there are no trees.