In the Days of the Comet

I SAW a gray-haired man a figure of hale age sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower very high so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances a remote horizon of sea a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful and in some subtle quality in this small difference and that new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might I thought be the Happy Future or Utopia or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory Henry James's phrase and story of The Great Good Place twinkled across my mind and passed and left no light. The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen a modern touch that prohibited any historical retrospection and as he finished each sheet writing in an easy flowing hand he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay loose partly covering others that were clipped together into fascicles.