Though in fact it is not a letter but an explanation. I am as you know your village headmaster and you understand who and what I am. Or at least you understand me as far as anyone can understand anyone else. You know me as one who takes care of your children. You know me, I hope, as a dedicated man. I am fifty years old and I have been here a long time. I have presided at your small concerts. I have a wife and children and have loved in my way this village since I first came to it many years ago when I was twenty-five years old on a fine day in a light such as I had never seen before on earth. I cannot describe to you what I felt that day. If I were a poet I might be able to but I am not. I am, I think, a very ordinary man and the older I grow the more ordinary and less exceptional I see that I am. But that day was the beginning of a new world, a new life. The air seemed cleaner, objects in the world more solid and luminous, the sky and sea bluer. It was as if I had undergone a resurrection.
