LONDON AT LEISURE
someone, each of these events of your day is "something". Each concert is something portentous and, in the world of music perhaps, makes history. Each religion that you see founded is to the sociologist something really significant, each cricket match a real "event" in which the best muscle and the best brain of the day is striving, delivering beautiful balls and making deft and beautiful strokes. But each of these things sinks back into the mere background of your you. You are, on the relentless current of your life, whirled past them as, in a train, you are whirled past a succession of beautiful landscapes. You have "seen" such and such a social event as you have seen, say, Damascus, from a saloon window.
You carry away from it a vague kaleidoscope picture—lights in clusters, the bare shoulders of women, white flannel on green turf in the sunlight, darkened drawing rooms with nasal voices chanting parodies of prayers, the up and down strokes of fiddle bows, the flicker of fifty couples whirling round before you as with a touch of headache you stood in a doorway, a vague recollection of a brilliant anecdote, the fag end of a conversation beneath the palms of a dimmed conservatory, and a fatigue and a feverish idea that if you had missed any one of these unimportant things you would have missed life.
But, if you had been a beanfeaster who missed a beanfeast, or if you had been a Saturday footballer who missed one match, you might have missed so much more of your life. And, indeed, since life is no more
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