And from the fig-tree learn a parable: when the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know the summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.

Even the gospel was more than one gospel. The reading for the last Sunday after Pentecost began with the abomination of desolation and with a warning to the reader. For three quarters of its length, the gospel for that last Sunday of the year continued to warn. Near the end came the clouds and the four winds, and then the last pause before the ultimate turmoil. And in that last pause, startlingly under the terrible sky, the fig-tree appeared, with its leaves coming forth.

More clearly than anything I read or heard in my childhood, that last pause near the end of the last gospel of the year told me that every thing would always be more than one thing. The last pause told me that every thing would always contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly at first sight, to contain the thing that had seemed to contain it.

Five years after I had heard the last gospel of the ecclesiastical year in the parish church of Saint Mark, Fawkner, I listened for the first time in my life to a piece of what I called classical music. Near the end of that music I heard a pause. The solemn themes of the music paused for a moment. Just before the clouds had drifted over all the sky and just before the four winds whistled and the last struggle began, I heard the pause of the summer that seemed nigh.

I have heard that pause many times since in pieces of music. I have heard the pause while I read the next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.

They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greenness appears in place of the greyness.

For an absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the other is the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.

But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four winds whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm. (Inland)