Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us
so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them
into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face
and the butcher a poet's; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that
even now (the first of November 1927)
we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily
movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at
the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is
there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer 'Yes'; if we are
truthful we say 'No'; nature,who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps
unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to
our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within
us--a piece of a policeman's trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen
Alexandra's wedding veil--but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly
stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a
capricious one at that.
Orlando
(58)
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