(A - Aron. B - Bernard.)

A. Let's talk cars!

B. I love it, when I'm lying in bed going to sleep, and I hear the distant hum of midnight vehicles, growing louder, dying away... Where to, who knows? I am too sleepy, my eyes are shut... the traffic drifts and ebbs like low tide, like the petulant night squabbles of gulls by the seaside, like faint shouting in the streets when you can't make out the words. Ignorant, restful... sleep now...

A. This is not what I mean by talking cars.

B. Have you noticed how, in rainy weather, the tail-lights and headlights cast glowing lines on the tarmac, which shimmer beneath the lights themselves? Cars show us things in nature we never could see before: varieties of frost and ice on the windscreens, the different ways they freeze and melt. Who ever heard of black ice before cars were invented? Who experienced the tricks of sight in fog as a motorist does? Did we ever really see that marvellous, rare and deadly thing freezing rain? We even sense the wind in a different aspect, when it tweaks the steering wheel at 60 mph. And in very hot weather I like to watch for when the road ahead is level with my eye and I catch a glimpse of the bottom of the car ahead reflected upside-down in the trembling air.

A. This isn't what I meant.

B. The wheel and the suspension separate people from the earth and put them in an insulated space where they can zoom along faster. I should have said "cruise". What a quintessentially modern word that is! But there is a loss of intelligence entailed by this comfy velocity - it is accurately reflected in our too-smooth music - we can still say "five miles" but we can't feel it any more. Our hands and feet (personally, I like to think with my whole body, you see) are cossetted, in cotton-wool - upholstered, you might almost say. This loss of intelligence is first anticipated, I think, in bad writing about water in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. You know how they love their "tinkling rills".

The wand'ring streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills...

That's Pope in "Eloïsa to Abelard". And then there's Scott:

And silver Lune, from Stanmore wild,
And fairy Thorsgill's murmuring child,
And last and least, but loveliest still,
Romantic Deepdale's slender rill.
Who in that dim-wood glen hath stray'd,
Yet long'd for Roslin's magic glade?

and so on and so forth. I don't know - maybe it isn't bad writing. It's lovely. It's a dream of suspension. Oh! - I've made a joke.

A. Have you?

B. They like the word "mingled", too. Scott is always using that.

A. Mingled?

B. Mingled, mixed, contending... "He looked on it with disgust, mingled not indeed with fear, but that sort of awe which the presence of a supernatural creature" etc. "'No,' said Argyle, pride contending with irresolution, 'it shall never be said that'" etc. "'I could,' said Sir Duncan, his voice struggling between the emotions of doubt, hatred, and anxiety - 'I could -'" etc. "His mixture of surprise, joy, and anxiety, did not deprive him of the presence of mind" etc. etc. Oh! it saddens me to present Scott when he is writing in his sleep. No-one reads Scott any more, do they?

A. My Dad tried once. I don't think he could get on with it.

B. Scott is one of my favourite authors, you know. He was a progressive man, he had gaslights at Abbotsford. And every novelist is to some extent a scientist, we can agree with Zola about that! This up-to-date scientific, rational side of Scott is the one that analyses, enumerates, splits things up into "surprise, joy and anxiety" and so on. But then the other side, the romantic side, knows that the human spirit is like a tinkling rill, something that can't be analysed or split up, something "mingled" beyond our capacities. The thought of it refreshes him. Already, in his time, people were tired and pestered and repelled by the jawing of mechanics and scientists, the dryness of analysis, the ugliness of the works. They feared obscurely that everything that really mattered, our souls and values and love and beauty and nature itself were being steamrollered and poisoned by the clever people. I think they were quite right. But they couldn't keep up with George Stephenson or Humphrey Davy, so they gave up their intelligence and went into a dream - of romantic Deepdale's slender rill. And now we dream of cruising down a lost highway, with Marlboro-country mountains in the distance. It's the same dream! What was once a romantic solace from science and mechanics has become, horribly, what science and mechanics have turned out for the millions. "You no longer want to feel or live", they say. "OK. You don't have to. Here is a product for you - a dream machine. Expensive, sure, but you won't mind that. You can't resist the sense of flowing power that comes from driving. You go where you want!" But no-one that I know ever does get to the Alps or the Rockies. They are bubble people sitting in cars in queues, enraged and bewildered, trying to get to work so they can earn enough to pay for their cars. Those... romantics!

A. That's very fine, but let me try and tell you -

B. I was behind a car yesterday - it was a Daewoo - and it had "Dual Air Bags" blazoned across the rear windscreen. Dual Air Bags! That is what I mean by loss of intelligence. It's OK to dream, but not to sell your life to brutish forces in order to dream.

A. This is merely scornful. Do you know what a roll-cage is? Or a decklid spoiler or a live rear axle? I'm not convinced you even really know what torque means. Or coupé. I think I heard you singing "Little Deuce Coupe" once. But what is that?

B. Well, I certainly don't respond to this sort of stuff: "Those 321 horses not only kick hard, they also produce a full spectrum of noises. The idling soundtrack is a low-key triad of hum, gurgle and boom, but as the needle of the rev counter flicks skyward, the burble turns into a rumble, the rumble into a roar and the roar into an amplified thunder."

A. What's the use of pornography for those who can't feel?

B. I think I can feel instantly when there's something different about my car's engine, same as you can. I just curse and take it to the garage.

A. You're missing so much. It's good when your car is more than just something functional. Everything in our lives should be more than just functional.

B. (struck by self-doubt) Yes, I suppose you're right. And why do I think buying cars is worse than - oh, I don't know, buying tickets for the World Cup? Or me, paying the admission to a stately home to look at the trees? But never mind - I've got sidetracked.

A. (pushing home the advantage) And this association you make between motoring and loss of intelligence - Isn't it the truth that to break free from the frictions and effort of walking on the ground is something that should precisely suit our intellectual urges? "For nimble thought can JUMP both sea and land!", as Shakespeare says. In a car your body can aspire to that free mobility the earthbound never enjoy. Maybe you have forgotten how stupefying a long walk can be? Your mind gets numbed by slow progress. But in a car, I am alert, I'm interacting with a hundred things, finger-dancing with the wheel, listening to the radio, reading a line of meshing traffic in an instant, reacting and thinking - thinking brightly and sharply. It's the best time for thinking I get.

B. "But ah! Thought kills me that I am not thought..." And surely something is lost by pretending that we are what we're not. When the oxen hauled the plough we knew their strength. Our muscles twitched sympathetically with theirs. We couldn't haul the plough ourselves, but we could just about envisage what it took to do it. I think the limit of my muscular sympathies is a stump-grinder chewing out the root of a beech. A stump-grinder is really an incredible thing. I have hacked at beech-roots myself. A hand-axe just clangs off. But whose muscles can sympathise with the power of a car, or a jet plane? The wings and wheels make everything dreamlike, detached from any experience you can call your own.

A. If I was dangerously sick, and you rushed me to hospital by oxen, I should have a very poignant sense of their ? strength.

*

But now, since I am disappointed of being able to talk about a subject I'm really into... because you know that with such a subject a new and different conversation can happen ... warm, tactful, social. Oh! I remember how Karl's face lit up at the office when I mentioned trainers to him, just casually - and I'd forgotten how Karl was such a keen runner, and it was as if a bottle-top had been eased, and he fizzed! "If you want to talk TRAINERS...!" he said. We were knee-deep in technicalities before I could blink. That's a very important kind of talk. I felt I knew him better after that. I liked him better.

B. Certainly. And I feel his relief. I may go to my grave with all my fervour for the Scandinavian poets bottled up inside. Probably never, in all my life, will I run across someone I can have that conversation with.

A. ... Oh.

B. Yes, it's almost a joke. When will I ever find anyone with whom I can share the beauty of a Tranströmer poem in exchange for some insight into Mirjam Tuominen? Someone with whom I can really talk about Karin Boye or Edith Södergran?

Dyningar, lysande långa,
sköljar i våg på våg genom nattblå evighet.
Du! Du! Du!

A. I feel these things are very private to you. I wonder how deeply you really want to have that conversation. It's an unusual interest, true, but in so populous an age I can't believe there is no channel for discussion. You could subscribe to something, or join something, if that was what you really wanted. The Internet has everything, doesn't it?

B. (shakes head impatiently) A baby, a kitten, is more help to me than the Internet!

A. I'm not sure. I think you sense that you have made a private kind of icon from writers and poems that, perhaps, you do not even understand very well. A public encounter might prove too indelicate - you might find that the Karin Boye you have allowed yourself to lean on is fractured beyond repair by some matter-of-fact fool like me appraising Boye's work like a buyer at a cheese fair - as if it was just poetry, an everyday thing, good in this way and bad in that way. For you, it is more than poetry - it is more than Poetry, even! The remoteness helps. It is all mixed up with your memories of the lakes and the pines. You could never feel that way about a British writer - someone published in the weekly papers...

B. I'm afraid you're right, Aron. In Sweden I have never grown up. In Sweden, where I don't live, I'm still an innocent. For example, in English I think that it is impossible to ever "explain" something, so when I see someone "explaining", I respond to it as a political act - they are lying, they are trying to put something over on you, they are trying to mould you, suppress your feelings, shut you up... Or else they are just gabbling what they have had put over on them by someone else. But in Swedish it's a different matter! In Swedish I think the word "förklara", which just means "explain", is so grave and beautiful. "Kan du förklara för mig...?", I ask my mother, and I think that this "förklara" is something wonderful that big folk do, like planting up gardens, so that little folk can play among the currant bushes...