i worry and i hope

the people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, so be seen, to kill time. they would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. but each of them had known some unforgotten moment - a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger's face seen in a bus - a moment when each had known a different sense of living. and each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. they had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. but each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.