Level 7

APRIL 3

This is really funny. Yesterday I wondered how long the music tapes were. Today, at dinner, a rumour was going round that the tapes of the first day were being repeated.

Some music fans swore they heard Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ on March 21, and yesterday they heard it again. Listeners to the programme of light music were saying the same thing, though I forget what tunes they said had come round for the second time.

So the music tapes are twelve days long. This is pretty long, one must admit, but still it is disappointing. At dinner everybody seemed a little saddened by the discovery, not only the music fans. It made me sad too. I wonder why.

I have never been a great music-lover. There are a couple of dozen classical pieces I enjoy listening to, certainly; but I have never had much interest in new stuff—either really new music, or just new to me. What I had heard of the selection on the tape was quite to my taste, and as far as I was concerned the amount of music on a twelve-day tape was plenty.

And yet the discovery that the tape was only twelve days long did give me a sharp pang of regret. And it would not have made any difference if the time had been longer: if the tape had run for a month, or a year, and then somebody had told me that it had just started at the beginning again, it would have given me the same sensation. It was the fact that the tape was limited that saddened me.

I wanted something, just something, on Level 7 to be unlimited. I suppose it is only human to crave things which are not limited as humans are. Perhaps this is one reason why people—up there—enjoy breathing fresh air: there is such an inexhaustible lot of it. For the same reason they like looking out over the ocean, which they know goes on beyond the visible horizon; or travelling across the water to places they have never seen before; or standing where they are and looking up at the night sky.

To us on Level 7—I think this was everybody’s sensation today—the seemingly unending stream of music held the last surviving suggestion of boundlessness, of infinity. Everything else was calculated and cut down to suit our needs. Space was limited, and the smallness of the rooms emphasized the limitations of our existence. The meals were the very opposite of infinite in their variety. The company was limited. Even the atomic energy supply was limited: enough for a thousand years it might be, but still we knew it had a limit.

Only the tape seemed to have no ending. It was the sea and the sky. It was the green jungle waiting for our exploring feet. Though our common sense told us this was ridiculous, it was immortality.

It was the tape of life—real life, not cave-existence. It added some colour to our grey days, and shone into the gloom of our despair as if a sunbeam from up there had broken all the rules and strayed down into Level 7. But it appears that the tape is only twelve days long.