Lao was jolted by that word – silence. It seemed to open up to him, in a landscape-flash, briefly, what his journey was truly about. The word knocked out something in his mind; and in a perfect stillness, which he had been unaccustomed to for a long time, he gazed into a warm and lighted inner realm as his eyes looked out into a brilliantly lit landscape of rocks, flowers, distant churches, high roads, and barley fields. His mind was in a place of sweetness unknown to him. From every pore, without knowing how, he drank in the lovely liquid of that state. He had a half-cynical smile on his face, the kind of smile that doubters have when they are being inwardly stirred, inwardly touched by the very thing they doubt. It was a smile both of resistance and submission, of denial and delight, of the spirit knowing a thing to be true and of the head still refusing to accept it as true.
‘Even if we don’t believe in it, we need the Arcadian dream,’ Lao said suddenly. ‘If only as a place where the spirit can rest. In life the body can have many holidays, but the spirit has so few. The body’s holidays are simple: sex, sun, beach, sea, sleep. But the spirit’s holidays are rarer: they are ideas, inspiration, Arcadias. The holidays of the spirit are more important than those of the body. The body has lots of holidays while it’s alive, and a long one when dead. The spirit has few holidays when in life. The holiday of the spirit replenishes civilisations, makes spiritual evolution effortless, and makes it possible for us to go up to the higher levels that we despair of reaching. Holidays of the spirit help us assimilate faster and more thoroughly all that we are and have been, they help the inner distillation, and they make us grow faster, greater and more organically. Holidays of the spirit are what bring about our true transformation from chrysalis to butterfly, from weakness to wisdom, from saplinghood to strength. We need Arcadia, for without it we will die of our neuroses.’
Then suddenly Lao stood up and went in search of Jim, for he had been faintly touched, in his core, for the first time, by the mysterious nature of what he had thought was a truly bad idea for a televised journey.