W. H. Auden has written a beautiful poem in which he speaks about the tension of the time being, which, he says, is the most trying time of all: Now we must dismantle the tree, putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes and carrying them up into the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burned. The children must return to school. There are enough leftovers to be warmed up for the rest of the week, not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot and stayed up so late. We attempted again this year to love all our relatives, and in general grossly overestimated our powers.

But for the time being, here we are back in the moderate Aristotelian City, where Euclid's geometry and Newton's mechanics could account for our experience, and the kitchen table exists because I scrub it. It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets are much narrower than we remembered. We had forgotten that the office was as depressing as this.