The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (The Original Unabridged 1942 Edition of 28 Essays)

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess—to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside.

But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil.

It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.

Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves.

But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea.

As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

We put out the eyes and the ears; but we pinion it there, with a bottle of medicine, a cup of tea, a dying fire, like a rook on a barn door; but a rook that still lives, even with a nail through it.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes