2 paragraphs from Doris Lessing’s ‘Under My Skin’ (vol one, autobiography to 1949)
Something else happened, which I have had to think about ever since. At a Mission in Old Umtali there was an afternoon’s fete, and black people as well as white wandered about under the trees drinking tea and eating cake. I had never been with black people as an equal, in a social situation. I was delighted. I was curious. I was threatened, and did not know how to behave. I went up to two old black men standing each with a teacup in his hand and began chatting, social stuff, of the kind my mother was so good at. I chattered and they listened, looking gravely down at me. Then one said gently, ‘You see, I am very old and you are very young.’
Nothing very much, you’d think. I had been given the mildest of snubs, with a smile that forgave. But that was not it. There was something about the occasion, the old men, the words, that ‘got to me’. I knew they had. But what? What happened? Yet not for years did anyone say anything as powerful, making me think, forcing me to use words, incident, old men, as if hidden there was some kind of original excellence, which I must refer to. But nothing had been said, judged in terms of simple sense. And yet everything had. Long after, when something of the same kind happened, and then again, and again – I understood it doesn’t matter what words are used, if a person waits, unconsciously, not even knowing it herself – himself — wanting to hear something, be struck by something, needing it, then words as apparently empty as ‘It’s a fine day’ can have the same effect. But time was needed for that little incident to lodge itself in my mind as a paradigm, and ….