Chapter 8 8. Spots on the wall【The Mark on the Wall】

Around mid-January of this year, I looked up and saw that spot on the wall for the first time.In order to determine which day it was, I had to recall what I saw.Now I remember the fire in the stove, with a yellow light that shone motionless on the pages of my book; and three chrysanthemums in a round glass jar on the mantelpiece.Yes, it must have been winter, and we had just finished our tea, because I remember I was smoking, and I looked up and saw that spot on the wall for the first time.I looked through the smoke of my cigarette, my eyes lingered for a moment on the flaming coals, and my old vision of a bright red banner flying on the castle tower came back to me, and I thought of countless red knights riding like a flood. The side slope of the upper black rock face.The spot interrupted the hallucination, and I was relieved that it was a hallucination from the past, an unconscious hallucination, probably from childhood.The spot on the wall was a small circular stain, dark black on the white wall, about six or seven inches above the fireplace.

How easy it is for our thoughts to flock to a new thing, like a group of ants frantically lifting a straw, lift it for a while, and then leave it there... If this spot is a nail left It must not be for hanging an oil painting, It was to hang a little portrait—a portrait of a lady with white powdered curly hair, a powdered face, and lips like red carnations.It was of course a forgery, and the previous tenants of the house would have chosen only that kind of painting—an old house had to have old-fashioned portraits to go with it.That's the kind of people they were--very interesting people, I think of them a lot, in strange places, because no one will ever see them again, and never know what happened to them afterwards.According to him, the family moved out of the house because they wanted a different set of furniture, and he was saying that, in his opinion, there should be a thought behind a work of art, when the two of us broke up Hands, this situation is like taking a train. In the train, we saw an old lady in a country villa by the roadside preparing to pour tea, and a young man was raising a racket to play tennis. The train passed by, and we and the old man The wife and the young man parted, leaving them behind the train.

But I still couldn't figure out what the spot was; I thought it didn't look like a nail mark.It's too big and too round.I could have stood up, but even if I had stood up and looked at it, nine times out of ten I couldn't tell what it was; because once a thing happens, no one can know how it happened .Oh my God, what a mystery life is; how inaccurate thought is! how ignorant man is! To prove how out of control we are over our own private goods--how much chance is human life compared with our civilization Ah - I'll suffice to name just a few of the lost objects in our lives.Let’s start with three light blue jars of stapler tools, forever the most mysterious of lost things—the spots on the wall lost—which cat would bite them, which mouse would To gnaw on them? Count the birdcages, iron skirts, steel skates, Queen Ann's coal scuttle, pinball-table, hurdy-gurdy—all lost, and some jewels, also lost.There were opalites, emeralds, all lost by the roots of the turnips.What a painstaking effort it took to save them! It is a miracle that I am surrounded by considerable furniture and have a few clothes on.If there is anything to compare it to life, it can only be compared to a man being shot out of an underground railway at fifty miles an hour, and coming out of the mouth of the tunnel with not a hair pin left in his hair.Naked and shot at God's feet! Fell headfirst on a daffodil-filled prairie like bundles of brown paper bags thrown down a post office pipeline! Hair flying like a racehorse Will be on the horse's tail.By the way, these comparisons can express the rapid speed of life, the endless consumption and repair; everything is so accidental, so coincidental.

And what about the afterlife? The thick green stalks are slowly pulled and bent down, and the cup-shaped flower overturns, enveloping people in its purple and red light.Why on earth do people have to be reborn here and not there, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to focus their eyes, groping at the feet of grass, among the toes of giants? As for what is a tree, what is a man and a woman, or Whether there is such a thing, people will not be able to say for another fifty years.There would be nothing but spaces of light and dark, separated by thick stems, and perhaps higher up some of a less distinct color--a touch of pink or blue. ──Rose-shaped plaque, as time goes by, it will become more and more clear and ──I don't know how...

But the spot on the wall is not a hole.It could well be some dark round object, say, a rose petal left over from summer, for I am not a very vigilant housekeeper—just look at the dust on the fireplace, which is said to be This dust buried the city of Troy for three layers, and there were only fragments of pots which they could not destroy, which is quite convincing. The tree branches outside the window gently knock on the glass... I hope I can think quietly, peacefully, and leisurely, without being disturbed by anyone, without getting up from the chair at all, and I can easily go from one thing to another, It does not feel hostile, nor does it feel hindered.I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, from the hard individual facts on the surface.Let me steady myself and catch the first fleeting thought... Shakespeare... yes, he or anyone else.The man sat securely in his armchair, gazing into the fire, and just like that—a steady stream of ideas poured down from some very high heaven into his mind.He leaned his forehead on his hands, and people stood looking in through the open gates—let's assume this scene happened on a summer evening—but how dull is all this historical fiction! Not interested in me.There is nothing more pleasing than the idea that I hope to come across an agreeable train of thought that will at the same time brighten me up a bit indirectly.Even the minds of modest, gray people who sincerely believe they don't like to hear compliments are often haunted by such thoughts.They're not flattering themselves, and that's the beauty of it.These thoughts went like this: "So I went into the house. They were talking about botany. I said I once saw a flower blooming in a heap of dust on the foundation of an old house in Kingsway. I said the flower seed was probably Planted during the reign of Charles I. What kind of flowers did people grow during the reign of Charles I?" I asked - (but I don't remember what the answer was) maybe tall flowers with purple spikes .So I think about it like this.At the same time, I've been adorning an image of myself in my head, lovingly and secretly, not overtly adoring it.Because, if I did do it openly, I'd get caught by myself, and I'd reach out and grab a book to cover myself.Strange to say, people instinctively protect their image from idolatry or some other treatment that makes it ridiculous, or makes it so different from the original that people don't believe it.But maybe this fact is not so strange? This question is extremely important.

Supposing the mirror shattered and the image disappeared, that romantic image and the surrounding green dense forest no longer existed, and there was only the outer shell of that person as seen by others—how dull, how superficial, how much the world would become How bare, how protruding! It is impossible to live in such a world.When we sit face to face in buses and subways, we are looking in a mirror; that's why our eyes are so glassy and hazy.Future novelists will realize more and more the importance of these ideas, not just one, but an infinite number of ideas; Beyond stories, the idea that such knowledge is innate is what the Greeks thought, and perhaps Shakespeare did too—but such generalizations are worthless.Just listening to the tone that sums up the word is enough.It makes one think of editorials, of cabinet ministers -- of the whole set of things that people assume as children as orthodoxy, the standard, the real thing, that everyone has to follow or risk going to the 18th floor Danger of hell.Speaking of generalizations, one somehow recalls Sundays in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday lunches, and also the ways of speaking, the dress, the habits of dead people—such as sitting together in a room until a certain An hour's habit, although no one likes to do it.Everything has certain rules.The rule of the tablecloth at that particular period was that it had to be made of tapestry with little yellow checks printed on it, like the carpets you see in the palace corridors in the photographs.Another pattern of tablecloth is not a real tablecloth.When we find that these real things, Sunday lunches, Sunday walks, manor houses and tablecloths, etc., are not all real, and do smack of phantoms, the punishment for disbelief is nothing but a How amazing and wonderful things are when you feel an illegitimate sense of freedom! I wonder what on earth replaces them now, the real, standard things? Maybe men, if you're a woman; The masculine point of view governs our lives, it sets the standard, sets out Whittaker's list; and I suspect it has taken on a phantasm for many men and women after the war, and we hope soon It would be ridiculed and thrown into the dustbin like phantoms, mahogany cupboards, Landseer prints, God, devils, and hell, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom— ─If freedom exists...

Looking at the spot on the wall under a certain light, it seems to protrude from the wall.It's not exactly round either.I'm not sure, but it seems to cast a faint shadow, making me think that if I run my finger along the wall, at some point I'll touch a small undulating barrow, a smooth barrow, just like the southern steppes Those barrows, it is said, are either graves or camps.Of the two, I'd rather they be graves, like most Brits I'm partial to sadness, and think it's natural to think at the end of a walk that there are bones buried in the grass... there must be a book about it.Some antiquities collector must have dug up these bones and given them a name... I wonder what an antiquities collector would be like? Probably some retired colonel leading a gang of aging workers Climb to the top here, examine the mud and stones, and communicate with nearby priests.The vicar opened the letter at breakfast and felt important.In order to compare the different arrowheads, many country trips were required, to the capital of the state, and such trips were a pleasant duty for priests and their wives who were trying to make cherry jam, or who were trying to pack Let's go to the study.They had every reason to hope that the great question of the camp or the grave would remain unresolved for a long time.The Colonel himself was cheerful and optimistic about whether evidence could be gathered on both sides of the question.Indeed, he was at last inclined to say camp.Opposed, he wrote an article to be read at the quarterly meeting of the local club, when he had a stroke and his last sober thoughts were not of wife and children but of camp and The arrowhead, which has been collected in the display case of the local museum, and the foot of a Chinese murderess, a pair of Elizabethan iron nails, a large pile of Tudor earthen pipes, a Roman The crockery, and the wine glass Nelson drank from - I really don't know what it proves.

No, no, nothing proved, nothing discovered.If I stood up at this very moment and realized that the spot on the wall was—how shall we say bad?—the head of a huge old nail that had been driven into the wall for two hundred years until now What do I gain from seeing modern life for the first time in a room with white walls and a roaring fire, the tops of nails showing through the paint thanks to the patient wiping of generations of handmaidens? Is it a subject for further thought? I can think equally well whether I am sitting still or standing up.What is knowledge? Our scholars are but the descendants of witches and hermits who squatted in caves and forests, boiled herbs, questioned gopher mice, or wrote the language of the stars, or what else could they be? Our superstitions are fading away , as our respect for ideas of beauty and health grows, we reverence them less... Yes, one can imagine a very lovely world.The world is peaceful and vast, with bright red and blue flowers blooming in the wilderness.In this world, there are no professors, no experts, and no housekeepers with police faces. Here, people can cut through the world with their own thoughts like a fish with its fins, and gently brush over the stalks of the lotus. Hovering over a nest full of white seabird eggs... Rooted in the center of the world, looking up through the gray water and the momentary flashes and reflections in the water, how peaceful it is here-if there is no Whitaker Yearbook──If there is no ranking list!

I had to jump up and see for myself what the spot on the wall was - a nail? A rose petal? A crack in a block of wood? Here again Nature is playing her old self-preserving trick.She thinks this line of thinking is at best a waste of energy, and it may conflict with reality a little, because who can criticize Whittaker's ranking list? After the Archbishop of Canterbury is the Lord Chancellor, and the Lord Chancellor Behind the judge was the Archbishop of York again.It was Whitaker's philosophy that everyone had to be behind someone.The most important thing is to know who should be behind whom.Whittaker knew.Be not irritated by it, but comforted by it, Nature advises you; and if you have no comfort, if you must spoil the hour of peace, think of the spots on the wall.

I understand what nature is playing -- she's secretly urging us to take action to end thoughts that tend to be exciting or painful.I think that's why we have a little contempt for doers--we think of them as unthinking.However, we might as well interrupt those unpleasant thoughts by looking at the spots on the wall.Really, the more I look at it now, the more I feel like I'm clinging to a plank in the middle of the ocean.I experienced a satisfying sense of reality that drove the two Archbishops and the Chancellor into a vision of nothingness.Here, it is a concrete thing, a real thing.We wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, which is often the case, turn on the light in a hurry, lie quietly for a while, admiring the wardrobe, admiring the real object, admiring the reality, admiring the world outside us, which proves that there is nothing but ourselves There are other things out there.That's what we want to figure out.Wood is a pleasant thing to contemplate.It arises from a tree, and trees grow, we don't know how they grow.They grow in meadows, in forests, by streams—these are all things we like to think about—and they grow, and grow, and grow for years, without noticing us at all.Cows were waving their tails under the trees on hot afternoons; the trees painted the creek so green that you thought the moorhen, which had plunged headlong into the water, should come out with green feathers.I like to think of the schools of fish swimming upstream like banners blown by the wind; I also like to think of the water beetles that build little domes of mounds on the river bed.I like to imagine the scene of the tree itself: first, the dense and dry feeling of its own wood, and then imagine it feeling the devastation of the thunderstorm; and then feel the sap flowing out slowly and comfortably.I also like to think about how this tree stands alone in the open field on a winter night, the leaves are tightly closed, the iron bullets fired at the moon, no weakness is exposed, like an empty mast standing on the ground. On the ground that keeps rolling all night.The twittering of birds in June must have sounded jarring and unaccustomed; the little insects scrambling over the folds of bark, or basking in the sun above the thin green canopy of leaves, ruby-like. How cold their feet will feel when their eyes are staring straight ahead... The cold air of the earth is so cold that the fibers of the trees are broken one by one.The last storm hit and the tree fell, its top branches sinking deep into the earth again.Even at this point, life is not over.The tree still has a million determined and sane lives scattered around the world.Some were in bedrooms, some in boats, some on sidewalks, and still others became the wainscoting of rooms where men and women sat and smoked after tea.The tree conjures up a multitude of peaceful, happy associations.I'd love to think about them one by one--but I've run into a block... Where did I get it? How did I get here? A tree? A river? Downs? Whittaker's Almanac? Wilderness? I can't remember anything.Everything is turning, sinking, sliding away, disappearing... things are in great turmoil.Someone is leaning over to me and saying:

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper." "yes?" "But there's no point in buying newspapers. . . . No news. Damn war, to hell with this war! . . . But anyway, I don't think we should have a snail on the wall." Oh, the spot on the wall! That's a snail. 8. The Mark on the Wall Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps . The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven in ches above the mantelpiece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. . . If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder–dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next . They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden ofthe suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book–binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal–scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wond er is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must like it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour— landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race–horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . . But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won' t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose–shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don't know what. . . And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigorous housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe. The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. . . I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. . . Shakespeare. . . Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm–chair, and looked into the fire, so—A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and ve ry frequent even in the minds of modest mouse–coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising themselves; "And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been known in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked—(but, I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self–protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths allabout it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one c ould not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely reliably , were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things s? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughing into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists. . . In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perfect shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumor, a smooth tumor like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. . . There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. . . What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged laborers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighboring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of imp Ortance, and the comparison of arrow–heads necessitates cross–country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophical in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine–glass that Nelson drank out of—proving I really don’t know what. No, no, nothing is proven, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say?—the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white–walled fire–lit room , what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew–mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honor them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases. . . Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. , spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open field ds. A world without professors or specialists or house–keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water–lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs. . . How peaceful it is drowned here, rooted in the center of the world and gazing up through the gray waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack—if it were not for the Table of Precedency! I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose–leaf, a crack in the wood? Here is nature once more at her old game of self–preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. I understand Nature's game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. . . Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water–beetles slowly raiding domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself:—first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close–furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond–cut red eyes. . . One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way. . . Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. . . There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying— “I'm going out to buy a newspaper.” “Yes?” “Though it's no good buying newspapers. . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! . . . All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall.” Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.