What are your feet doing, a year hence?...where, while riding in your Kentish lanes, are you riding twelve months hence? I am sometimes in Mexico, selling cloth: or in Russia, doing Lord knows what: in Serbia or the Balkans: in England, never. England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory and the ideal. Sorley is the Gaelic for wanderer. I have had a conventional education: Oxford would have corked it. But this has freed the spirit, glory be. Give me the Odyssey, and I return the New Testament to store. Physically as well as spiritually, give me the road.
Only sometimes the horrible question of bread and butter shadows the dream: it has shadowed many, I should think. It must be tackled. But I always seek to avoid the awkward, by postponing it.
You figure in these dreams as the pioneer-sergeant. Perhaps you are the Odysseus, I am but one of the dog-like ἑταῖροι[1]... But however that may be, our lives will be πολύπλαγκτοι[2], though our paths may be different. And we will be buried by the sea—
Timon will make his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachéd verge of a salt flood,
Which twice a day with his embosséd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.
Details can wait—perhaps for ever. These are the plans. (16 June 1915)
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