I frequently encountered and gradually became increasingly captivated with the painting hung up at a friend's place. Those eyes that are permeated with a deep, thorough engrossment, the body relaxed leaning on top of the table: he doesn't even realise he's reached there but he doesn't second guess his rather odd position: it is so natural and it couldn't be any other stance: he wouldn't hear everything as well. His cheeks are flushed and he is otherwise comfortable. No, he is ecstatic as each word flows after the previous and clicks into its righteous place.

Inside the painting are contained my best conversations which often were ones in which I didn't utter a word. The Discourse by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema sketches that student that I sat as when I listened to my teachers, intensely intoxicated by their next word, almost devoted to that sensation of comprehension.

Draped upon both bodies are relaxed fabrics in easy, muted colours that are good for this sort of discussion: nothing is or can be wrong or slightly off. The light of day falls upon them gently through the window, he doesn't notice the light change at all as the hour hand moves. The student wishes for a pen and a paper but he couldn't possibly write all of it down: more crucially he isn't going to stop the flow of those sentences, he will never think about that or about moving until the sensible teacher prompts it.

His heart pounds in his ears once he leaves: he has fed on honeydew and walks into a crowd that knows where it is headed and he stands in its center suddenly still. No eyes lie upon him, not the sun’s, not the moon’s. The day may be confused but the subsistence of the prose’s bubbling lucidity occupies him in a form so insistently real that the student succumbs readily to reality for a period of time significant to his fleeting theoretical mind.

He is not so far from what is divine and he almost has all he needs.