y thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I
suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action--men, we assume,
who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's
disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have
grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which
at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the
shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus,
waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light
and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping
solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is
a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be
sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a
tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and
years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in
forests, and by the side of rivers--all things one likes to think about.
The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint
rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its
feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish
balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles
slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think
of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then
the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like
to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with
all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of
the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all
night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June;
and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make
laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon
the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them
with diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap beneath the
immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and,
falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so,
life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still
for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement,
lining rooms, where men and women