Reprise

‘…This City now doth like a garment wear/ The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,..’

He has been here before:  on ‘Westminster Bridge’ – actually, Waterloo Bridge – in the tiny hours of the morning in early summer, revelling in the silence of the city, the emptiness of the metropolis.

Then, nearly thirty years earlier, he hadn’t known Wordsworth’s poem. Nor had Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later exploited the same isolation, in a different mood. He had simply been there, in the moment, at that time, and felt the feelings; first the horror, then the wonder.

Then, in his early manhood, his life involved friends but not love – not satisfyingly, at least – that special kind of emptiness which is self-centred longing to be significant. His life had richness though he was, at his core, responding to a shallow sentimentality. A familiar theme, of sexual frustration overlain by a vast capacity for both passion and emotion, of being close to resolution but knowing its impossibility at the same time.

He reflects upon the contradictions which have run, still run, through his life. It is a Heraclitean moment, watching the passing of the water beneath him, immersed in the similarity and difference of the moment he is now experiencing. Life runs back to the same places, he recalls, we live in the recurrence that Nietzsche imagined. But this is not a condemnation, not a sentence, but a reminder of promise.

Now he stands, contemplating the scene with that once-known awe subsumed beneath the sense of recollection, the feeling of the weight of years of living, growing, changing, being the same, holding in check the purity of the original emotion.

We modify ourselves, he considers, to adjust to circumstance, chance and fortune, ups and downs. And though I am the same person, I am not the same person. Some things cannot remain. He still has friends, but now, too, he has known the glory of love, the pleasure of passion, the ecstasy for which his heart had once longed. Today there is no shallow sentimentality, instead, something close to wisdom, an understanding of the importance of context, of timing, to the living of a life. Having been loses its power to being here and now, at this place, at this time, with these people.

And so he can stand, here and how, no longer alone, his beloved beside him, silent, and remember, reflect, rejoice, reprise.

He feels an ache at his core as a sudden fierce joy threatens to overwhelm him. Tears begin to form around his eyes, blurring the edges of view. He feels as if he is about to burst, overflowing with being.

Not the same, he thinks. She has made me more, granted me the gift of significance, completed the circle. She has chosen to love me and I, we, are alive again. I love her beyond the simple expression of the words. She has returned me to myself. And of her, not the view, not the moment, just the person, as he turns to gaze upon her contemplative restfulness; earth has not anything to show more fair.

Reprise.