more altar, the Harbury pulpit
and Mr. Siddons, stood between me and the idea of God, so that it needed
years and much bitter disillusionment before I discovered my need of it.
And I was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. We did no logic nor
philosophy at Harbury, and at Oxford it was not so much thought we came
to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien
exercises in thinking. There is no such effective serum against
philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. The
philosophical teaching of Oxford at the end of the last century was not
so much teaching as a protective inoculation. The stuff was administered
with a mysterious gilding of Greek and reverence, old Hegel's monstrous
web was the ultimate modernity, and Plato, that intellectual
journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was
as it were the God of Wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the
whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the God of fact....

So I fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. I
would serve the empire. That should be my total significance. There was
a Roman touch, I perceive, in this devotion. Just how or where I should
serve the empire I had not as yet determined. At times I thought of the
civil service, in my more ambitious moments I turned my thoughts to
politics. But it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the
last a reasonable possibility.

I would serve the empire.

Sec. 3

And all the while that the first attempts to consolidate, to gather
one's life together into a purpose and a plan of campaign, are going on
upon the field of the young man's life, there come and go and come again
in the sky above him the threatening clouds, the ethereal cirrus, the
red dawns and glowing afternoons of that passion of love which is the
source and renewal of being. There are times when that solicitude
matters no more than a spring-time sky to a runner who wins towards the
post, there are times when its passionate urgency dominates every fact
in his world.

Sec. 4

One must have children and love them passionately before one realizes
the deep indignity of accident in life. It is not that I mind so much
when unexpected and disconcerting things happen to you or your sisters,
but that I mind before they happen. My dreams and anticipations of your
lives are all marred by my sense of the huge importance mere chance
encounters and i