I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can’t touch – like England ‘s grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
