Going
to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.
Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing -
Can fix the high elusive hour
And stand in things divine.
And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.
So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
in a ring and singing songs.
