After his extraordinary speech, Propr turned towards the approaching waitress. A pungent silence hung over the table. The speech had produced a strong effect, a sobering effect. It seemed to have dampened the lively Parisian evening. The acrobats suddenly seemed listless. The applause they drew was desultory. A stale wind, bearing the odours of the warm gutters and faded perfume, wafted over from the Seine. The Mozartian busker’s vitality appeared to peter out, giving the lovely flute melody a slowed-down depressing quality of jaded hopes and feeble yearnings. The gypsies were the only ones who retained their unique mercurial air, indomitable, with their bright colours still charming the evening with a magic undimmed by world-weariness.
Jim summoned the waiter and ordered four bottles of white wine and rosé. Nervously the gathered crew consulted the menu. Those who could read French did so loudly, sharing their understanding of the menu with those who didn’t, much to the irritation of the latter. Lao couldn’t read French, and peered at the menu with a studious air, his mind vacant, a condition which produced interesting results, for he found to his quiet pleasure that he could make out what was beef and what was chicken, what was potato and what lamb, without trying. He concluded that being in a fine mood sometimes compensated for ignorance.
Mistletoe, being able to read French, confirmed his intuitions. Jute glared at the menu reproachfully, clearly resenting the obscurity of the French language and its unwillingness to yield to the common sense of English. One could see her eyes trying to find the English words hidden within the French words, without much success, and she was obliged, as a proud Northerner, to order blind, as it were, on pure speculation.
Soon the waiter came round, and orders were laboriously taken. Drinks were poured, a toast was proposed to the success of the film expedition, to the Arcadian notion, and to a happy outcome. Then the wine was drunk. Another silence ensued. Then, clearing his throat, Sam, the cameraman, spoke next:
‘There must be a personal reason why Propr talked so passionately about the suspect nature of seekers. And he speaks well and largely truthfully about many of them. Maybe deep down Propr is a secret seeker, or an ex-seeker.’
There was some laughter round the table at this. Propr’s only response was an enigmatic twitching of his moustache. Sam continued.
‘I know a lot of seekers. They are always back-packing their way round the world. They are always hurrying to see things. They go to exotic places, take part in some ritual or other, meet others, hook up, carry on their journey to the next place, and they only have what they saw and what little they did as their experience. They are always travelling through. They never travel into. They insult the cultures and philosophies and religions of others without knowing it. And they do so in complete earnestness, naїveté, and innocence. But they are one kind of seeker. There are other kinds, just as intolerable. They are seekers that stay at home, seeking for things in books, in history, in the past, and they too are just as lost, just as confused as the seekers that Propr describes. These other seekers don’t look at the world. They don’t look at nature. They don’t look at their fellow human beings. They think that books are more important than people. They think that books are more important than life. They take little interest in politics, in fashion, in the young, in outsiders. They are blinkered and blinded by too much knowledge that isn’t really wisdom. And what they know, what they call knowledge is not much use to them and not very practical. I don’t claim to be as practical as Propr. I don’t have a farm, I don’t tend sheep, and I’m not a shepherd. I believe in the senses, in sensual things. I suppose I’m a sort of romantic. I like impossible things. Things that are easy to do bore me. Things that are easy to get bore me. Maybe that’s why my life is not so great. But that’s the only way I can be happy: seeking for impossible things, and never finding them. I am restless. Something deep is missing in my life. I don’t know what it is. I used to think it was beautiful women, but when I get them, and have them, the thing I’m looking for, that’s missing in my life, seems even more acute. As I get older a terrible longing for something that I can’t give a name to takes greater possession of me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in great panic because of it. I can’t stay still because of it, and may well die looking for it. That’s my nature. I don’t know what it is. It isn’t money, career, family, success, or achievement. Everything seems hollow in relation to it, this thing that’s missing in my life. Sometimes I have a dream and I’m in a room as immense as the universe and I can’t move because of the terrible weight of my body and yet there’s something in me that wants to be free in that immense space but that’s trapped in my body and it’s absolute agony, that unfreedom, that imprisonment in the body. I wake up in a great sweat, and in a sort of immortal terror. One can’t escape the truth one must face in one’s dreams. At the end of the day there’s nowhere to hide. One either lives or dies. If one dies, one dies in such ignorance, without having tried to penetrate the wonderful mysteries of life. Wasted time in the university of experience. But if one lives, then sooner or later one has to deal with the ache and the problem of that thing missing deep in one’s life, that deep longing. And so I’m sort of sympathetic to this Arcadia thing. I’ve never heard of it before, and that’s enough to make it interesting and fascinating to me. It seems to me that most people, if they look deep enough within themselves, have an elusive something that they are looking for, an elusive peace, an elusive happiness, a crucial bit of the jigsaw of life. A need for meaning. A greater sense of purpose. I don’t know how one can be human without this longing, this yearning. To be without it smacks to me of a singular lack of imagination, of sensitivity, of humanity. I too like bread and wine and things you can touch and feel and see and measure. I’m not averse to money, and like everyone else, I too dream of fame. But fame is not it. I should know. I make films with the famous, and there’s not much to them apart from being famous. It’s we who confer this condition on them. It is not something they have. Fame is a sort of perfume that some people have sprayed on them. The fragrance is nice and mysterious enough while it lasts, but it soon wears off and they have to live with their own natural ordinary smells. And one can only hope for their sake that their natural smell is good. But it usually isn’t so they keep needing more fame to cover up the bad smell of what they really are. I think it is better to smell good naturally. Call it natural fame if you like, natural charisma, natural shine. There are people who have that natural fame, that shine, and when you encounter them it’s like meeting one of life’s true stars. These are developed souls, I think, quietly astonishing people. And it’s got nothing to do with looks. The camera loves that natural shine, and I trust the camera. There are things that the camera picks up that aren’t visible to the ordinary eye; it picks up people’s auras, their true nature, their true light. It’s hard to explain, and it doesn’t take the form most people think. Only a few can pick up on this mysterious radiance. And so while I’m on this journey I’m prepared to be open to the notions that inspire us because I sense that life is empty without some sort of dream, some enchanted purpose, without some sort of intangible something. And in my time as a cameraman I’ve experienced some pretty strange things to do with light that tells me that there’s more to life than we think there is. The fact is that, in spite of my ponytail and my air of being a sensualist, I’m just as lost and confused as anybody else.’