One day, after stepping out from the Greek revivalist portals of the National Art Gallery into Trafalgar Square, I took a seat beside one of the two fountains. Nearby, a stony Viscount Horatio Nelson stood atop his one hundred and seventy-foot Corinthian column protected by four twenty-foot bronze lions, strange companions indeed for a nautical hero.

Trafalgar Square had always been a popular venue for large-scale political demonstrations. It was where the late Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the Third Earl Russell, the famous British mathematician and Nobel laureate, sat on the ground with other antinuclear protesters. The great socialist and pacifist, described as “the champion of humanity and freedom of thought,” also propounded logical positivism. This philosophical notion holds that knowledge is derived only from empirical data. In other words, if you can’t see it, smell it, touch it, or hear it, then it does not exist, which is fine unless you happen to be a frog in a well or a lifelong resident of Mipuli Mipulongu, in which case certain limitations may apply. Believing in the immediacy of our sensual perceptions as the only objective evidence could not have offered any comfort to me on that damp evening.

Due to the artificiality of those London days, my loneliness could not be mitigated by the sound of the wind or the feel of the lashing rain against the bowed head or the delightful prospects of wood and dale and mountain. Only an occasional poem alleviated the nagging, bittersweet feelings. As I watched the pigeons fluttering down one by one into the orb of artificial light, fighting off the dusk of that chilly evening in Trafalgar Square, I made my heartfelt plea to humanity. Not so much a demand for inalienable rights but a humble request for a little recognition, contained in a couple of lines of a poem that percolated from the melancholy of the moment:

I do not ask for much, young daughters.
Just smile sweetly without word or touch and pass on into the night.

It is clear that my resignation at that time, although not free of sexual overtones, was pretty well established.