With hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or
whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the
youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the
joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they
return to their mountains later on....
And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a
book....
Into half a book; for here - at Alatri, and now - midsummer, I mean to
terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less
insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those
mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly
couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to
feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant.
Half a book: I perceive it clearly. These pages might be rounded by
another hundred or two. The design is too large for one volume; it
reminds me of those tweed suits we used to buy long ago whose pattern
was so "loud" that it "took two men to show it off." Which proves how a
few months' self-beguilement by the wayside of a beaten track can become
the subject of disquisitions without end. Maybe the very aimlessness of
such loiterings conduces to a like method of narrative. Maybe the tone
of the time fosters a reminiscential and intimately personal mood, by
driving a man for refuge into the only place where peace can still be
found - into himself. What is the use of appealing in objective fashion
to the intelligence of a world gone crazy? Say your say. Go your way.
Let them rave! We shall all be pro-German again to-morrow. [32]
Half a book: it strikes me, on reflection, as curiously appropriate. To
produce something incomplete and imperfect, a torso of a kind - is it not
symbolical of the moment? Is not this an age of torso's? We are
manufacturing them every hour by the score. How many good fellows are
now crawling about mutilated, converted into torso's? There is room for
a book on the same lines....
I glance through what has been written and detect therein an occasional
note of exacerbation and disharmony which amuses me, knowing, as I do,
its transitory nature. Dirty work, touching dirt. One cannot read for
three consecutive years of nothing but poison-gas and blood and
explosives without engendering a corresponding mood - a mood which
expresses itself in every one according to whether he thinks
individually or nationally; whether he cultivates an impartial
conscience or surrenders to that of the crowd. For the man and his race
are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning
subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect.
