Ressun

Another Sunday, another lesson.

I'm not sure how much I learn anymore.

We were all somehow tired this week. Fujiwara-sensei, recovering from the awkward class outing the week before, was particularly downbeat. "Moshikashitara," she droned, as we tried our best not to give in to the pathetic fallacy beating at the windows. Someone - was it Coyve? - had pointed out early on our teacher's penchant for emotional oscillation. I was appreciative of the clairvoyance, but his gift was little more than cold comfort at this juncture: whether we liked it or not, it appeared that we were going to have three excrutiating hours ahead of us.

Abruptly, however, the rain outside pattered to a halt. Andrew, the precocious boy behind me, awoke with a start. A few other students coughed unconsciously to break the newfound monotony. Fujiwara-sensei, her back to us only a few moments before, turned from the whiteboard. "Ara," she said, looking out at the Orchard Road skyline. There was a smile playing at the corners of her lips. "Minna, sora o mite!"

Everybody, look at the sky. So we all looked, each searching for the thing that would perish his or her own late afternoon stupor, his or her own disappointment with life. But nothing came forward to volunteer: no helicopters, aeroplanes or transient rainbows. No banners or fervent human activity, however conceived. There were only clouds, and sky.

I looked back at Fujiwara-sensei, who by now had abandoned her lugubrious teacher-mode. For the first time today, she was smiling - she had smiled at us all as we filed into the classroom, but this was a real smile. Her eyes, normally dwarfed by profuse applications of lady's crayon, were radiant and alive. I felt my body unclench as I watched her unbridled unfurling. And then I turned to the window and saw, immediately, what it was she wanted us to see. What she wanted herself to see.

The sky, tinged a slight sunset orange, was somehow still the bluest and clearest it had been in recent years. It was a blue that spoke to the depth of the profoundest oceans; a blue that told of tales between eagles, ages and satellites. The clouds, from ponderous forms, had resumed their fluffy consistencies and appeared almost to have been painted on by Vettriano himself. In that instant, the bare briefest of moments, I heard in my mind's eye the music that would accompany me to my grave, the final lullaby that my children's children would never come to hear, know or love. And in that moment I was content.

I turned away from the window and, for some reason, wound up meeting Fujiwara-sensei's gaze. She had her own appreciation of the sky, her own understanding, I was sure. But in that merest of moments, I saw her; her soul, her history, her unmitigated, yet unqualified truth. A young, ambitious lady of 24, momentarily resigned to the fact that however far she tried to escape the land of the rising sun, that same sun would set just as beautifully in any country, over any sea, in the company of any people. In that scintilla temporis I was certain she saw herself too: the futility of her running, the pointlessness of her desires, the shamefulness of her perpetual struggle against equanimity.

And just as suddenly as it had come on, the spell came to a precipitate end; and as one we all turned away from transparent joy to opaque agenda.

"Moshikashitara," Fujiwara-sensei repeated, her short, grateful surrender already long forgotten. Feigned enthusiasm was once more the order of the day, and she evinced no self-pity in serving. "I probably cannot ... do something. I probably cannot."

I looked down at my notes, but all I could feel was a slight tingling at the ends of my fingers. There had been something there, for that slightest of moments, something ... It had tiptoed to the edges of life's meaning, I remembered, a microcosm of anything and everything that ever mattered; and yet it had been distant, remote and cold, a universe away from everything that I wanted in life.

"Dou iu imi desu ka?" Something else ... something.

Another Sunday, another lesson.

I'm not sure how much I learn anymore.