bitela.blogg.se

When I find myself oppo­site the words ​ “Sun­light Soap” I can exhaust all the aspects of Sun Wor­ship, Apol­lo, and Sum­mer poet­ry before I go on to the less con­ge­nial sub­ject of soap. There were no adver­tise­ments on the walls of the car­riage, oth­er­wise I could have plunged into the study, for any col­lec­tion of print­ed words is quite enough to sug­gest infi­nite com­plex­i­ties of men­tal inge­nu­ity. I had not even a pen­cil and a scrap of paper with which to write a reli­gious epic. The time was towards evening, but it might have been any­thing, for every­thing resem­bling earth or sky or light or shade was paint­ed out as if with a great wet brush by an unshift­ing sheet of quite colour­less rain. I was locked up in a third-class car­riage for a rather long jour­ney. I here only wish briefly to recall the spe­cial, extra­or­di­nary, and hith­er­to unprece­dent­ed cir­cum­stances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pock­ets. Such at least has hith­er­to been my state of inno­cence. But I have quite for­got­ten what any of them are and there is real­ly noth­ing (except­ing the mon­ey) that I shall be at all sur­prised at find­ing among them. They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead and I sup­pose that on the same occa­sion long strings of extra­or­di­nary things will come run­ning out of my pock­ets. But I regard the rich­es stored in both these bot­tom­less chasms with the same rev­er­ent igno­rance.

I sup­pose that the things that I have dropped into my pock­ets are still there the same pre­sump­tion applies to the things that I have dropped into the sea. If once any­thing slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Vir­gilian farewell. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with them, so long as I can keep them out of my pock­ets.

But I can always pret­ty sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly account for all my pos­ses­sions. Per­haps it would be the exag­ger­a­tion of eulo­gy to call me a tidy per­son. For in tak­ing things out of my own pock­et I had at least one of the more tense and quiv­er­ing emo­tions of the thief I had a com­plete igno­rance and a pro­found curios­i­ty as to what I should find there. My act can real­ly with some rea­son be so described. I have only once in my life picked a pock­et, and then (per­haps through some absent-mind­ed­ness) I picked my own.

No one but GKC could turn a train ride with nothing to read into an adventure in pickpocketing (his own pockets, no less!) with such delightful results. If today is one of those days for you, enjoy. Some days, you just need a good visit with G.K.