Lesson34

This is a sceptical age, but although our faith in many of the things in which our forefathers fervently believed has weakened, our confidence in the curative properties of the bottle of medicine remains the same as theirs. This modern faith in medicines is roved by the fact that the annual drug bill of the Health Services is mounting to astronomical figures and shows no signs at present of ceasing to rise. The majority of the patients attending the medical out-patients departments of our hospitals feel that they have not received adequate treatment unless they are able to carry home with them some tangible remedy in the shape of a bottle of medicine, a box of pills, or a small jar of ointment, and the doctor in charge of the department is only too ready to provide them with these requirements. There is no quicker method of disposing of patients than by giving them what they are asking for, and since most medical men in the Health Services are overworked and have little time for offering time-consuming and little-appreciated advice on such subjects as diet, right living, and the need for abandoning bad habits, etc., the bottle, the box, and the jar are almost always granted them.

Nor is it only the ignorant and ill-educated person who has such faith in the bottle of medicine, especially if it be wrapped in white paper and sealed with a dab of red sealing-wax by a clever chemist. It is recounted of Thomas Carlyle that when he heard of the illness of his friend, Henry Taylor, he went off immediately to visit him, carrying with him in his pocket what remained of a bottle of medicine formerly prescribed for an indisposition of Mrs Carlyle's. Carlyle was entirely ignorant of what the bottle in his pocket contained, of the nature of the illness from which his friend was suffering, and of what had previously been wrong with his wife, but a medicine that had worked so well in one form of illness would surely be of equal benefit in another, and comforted by the thought of the help he was bringing to his friend, he hastened to Henry Taylor's house. History does not relate whether his friend accepted his medical help, but in all probability he did. The great advantage of taking medicine is that it makes no demands on the taker beyond that of putting up for a moment with a disgusting taste, and that is what all patients demand of their doctors-- to be cured at no inconvenience to themselves.

Lesson35

Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century, the strangest of them being perhaps the hovercraft. In 1953, a former electronics engineer in his fifties, Christopher Cockerell, who had turned to boat-building on the Norfolk Broads, suggested an idea on which he had been working for many years to the British Government and industrial circles. It was the idea of supporting a craft on a' pad ', or cushion, of low-pressure air, ringed with a curtain of higher pressure air. Ever since, people have had difficulty in deciding whether the craft should be ranged among ships, planes, or land vehicles--for it is something in between a boat and an aircraft. As a shipbuilder, Cockerell was trying to find a solution to the problem of the wave resistance which wastes a good deal of a surface ship's power and limits its speed. His answer was to lift the vessel out of the water by making it ride on a cushion of air, no more than one or two feet thick. This is done by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the bottom of the craft. It 'flies', therefore, but it cannot fly higher--its action de- pends on the surface, water or ground, over which it rides.

The first tests on the Solent in 1959 caused a sensation. The hovercraft travelled first over the water, then mounted the beach, climbed up the dunes, and sat down on a road. Later it crossed the Channel, riding smoothly over the waves, which presented no problem.

Since that time, various types of hovercraft have appeared and taken up regular service--cruises on the Thames in London, for instance, have become an annual attraction. But we are only at the beginning of a development that may transport net-sea and land transport. Christopher Cockerell's craft can establish transport works in large areas with poor communications such as Africa or Australia; it can become a 'flying fruit-bowl', carrying bananas from the plantations to the ports, giant hovercraft liners could span the Atlantic; and the railway of the future may well be the 'hovertrain', riding on its air cushion over a single rail, which it never touches, at speeds up to 300 m.p.h.--the possibilities appear unlimited.

Lesson36

Our knowledge of the oceans a hundred years ago was confined to the two-dimensional shape of the sea-surface and the hazards of navigation presented by the irregularities in depth of the shallow water close to the land. The open sea was deep and mysterious, and anyone who gave more than a passing thought to the bottom confines of the oceans probably assumed that the sea-bed was flat. Sir James Clark Ross had obtained a sounding of over 2,400 fathoms in 1836 but it was not until 1800, when H.M.S. Porcupine was put at the disposal of the Royal Society for several cruises, that a series of deep soundings was obtained in the Atlantic and the first samples were collected by dredging the bottom. Shortly after this the famous H.M.S. Challenger expedition established the study of the sea-floor as a subject worthy of the most qualified physicists and geologists. A burst of activity associated with the laying of submarine cables soon confirmed the Challenger's observation that many parts of the ocean were two to three miles deep, and the existence of underwater features of considerable magnitude.

Today enough soundings are available to enable a relief map of the Atlantic to be drawn and we know something of the great variety of the sea-bed's topography. Since the sea covers the greater part of the earth's surface it is quite reasonable to regard the sea-floor as the basic form of the crust of the earth, with superimposed upon it the continents, together with the islands and other features of the oceans. The continents form rugged tablelands which stand nearly three miles above the floor of the open ocean. From the shore-line out to a distance which may be anywhere from a few miles to a few hundred miles runs the gentle slope of the continental shelf, geologically part of the continents. The real dividing-line between continents and oceans occurs at the foot of a steeper slope.

This continental slope usually starts at a place somewhere near the ice-fathom mark and in the course of a few hundred miles reaches the true ocean-floor at 2,500-3,000 fathoms. The slope averages about 1 in 30, but contains steep, probably vertical, cliffs, and gentle sediment-covered terraces, and near its lower reaches there is a long tailing-off which is almost certainly the result of material transported out to deep water after being eroded from the continental masses.

Lesson37

The Victorians, realizing that the greatest happiness accorded to man is that provided by a happy marriage, endeavoured to pretend that all their marriages were happy. We, for our part, admitting the fact that no feat of intelligence and character is so exacting as that required of two people who desire to live permanently together on a basis of amity, are obsessed by the problem of how to render the basic facts of cohabitation simpler and more reasonable, in order that unhappy marriages may less frequently result. The Victorians would have considered it 'painful' or 'unpleasant' were one to point out that only four marriages out of every ten are anything but forced servitudes. We ourselves start from this very assumption and try to build from it a theory of more sensible relations between the sexes. Of all forms of arrant untruthfulness Victorian optimism appears to me to have been the most cowardly and the most damaging.

Truth, therefore, is an attitude of the mind. It is important, if one does not wish to inconvenience and to bore one's friends, not to tell lies. But it is more important not to think lies, or to slide into those mechanical and untruthful habits of thought which are so pleasant and so easy as descents to mental ineptitude. The victorian habit of mind (which I consider to have been a bad habit of mind) was unduly preoccupied by what was socially and morally convenient. Convenience is, however, in all affairs of life, an execrable test of value. One should have the courage to think uncomfortably, since it is only by rejecting the convenient that one can come to think the truth.

Not, after all, that there is any such thing as truth. At best we can approach to some relative approximation. On the other hand, there is surely such a thing as untruth. One is generally aware when one has said something, or acted in some way which has left on other people an impression not strictly in accordance with the facts. One is generally aware, also. when one has thrust aside an inconvenient thought and slid into its place another thought which is convenient. One's awareness in the former case is in general more acute than in the latter, since we are more on the look-out for the lies we utter than for those we merely think. In fact, however, it is the untruthful thought which is the more vicious of the two. Spoken lies are invariably tiresome and may actually be dishonest. But continuous lying in the mind, a disease to which the Anglo-Saxon is peculiarly exposed, spells the destruction of human thought and character.

Lesson38

Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the abi8lity to respond to form in three dimensions. That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts; certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more people are 'form-blind' than colour-blind. The child learning to see, first distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths. Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop(partly by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly three-dimensional distances. But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further. Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence.

This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of , and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air.

And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence. He must, for example, perceive an egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food, or from the literary idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms of combinations of several forms.

Lesson39

In his own lifetime Galileo was the centre of violent controversy; but the scientific dust has long since settled, and today we can see even his famous clash with the Inquisition in something like its proper perspective. But, in contrast, it is only in modern times that Galileo has become a problem child for historians of science.

The old view of Galileo was delightfully uncomplicated. He was, above all, a man who experimented: who despised the prejudices and book learning of the Aristotelians, who put his questions to nature instead of to the ancients, and who drew his conclusions fearlessly. He had been the first to turn a telescope to the sky, and he had seen there evidence enough to overthrow Aristotle and Ptolemy together. He was the man who climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped various weights from the top, who rolled balls down inclined planes, and then generalized the results of his many experiments into the famous law of free fall.

But a closer study of the evidence, supported by a deeper sense of the period, and particularly by a new consciousness of the philosophical undercurrents in the scientific revolution, has profoundly modified this view of Galileo. Today, although the old Galileo lives on in many popular writings, among historians of science a new and more sophisticated picture has emerged. At the same time our sympathy for Balileo' s opponents has grown somewhat. His telescopic observation are justly immortal; they aroused great interest at the time, they had important theoretical consequences, and they provided a striking demonstration of the potentialities hidden in instruments and apparatus. But can we blame those who looked and failed to see what Galileo saw, if we remember that to use a telescope at the limit of its powers calls for long experience and intimate familiarity with one's instrument? Was the philosopher who refused to look through Galileo's telescope more culpable than those who alleged that the spiral nebulae observed with Lord Rosse's great telescope in the eighteen-forties were scratches left by the grinder? We can perhaps forgive those who said the moons of Jupiter were produced by Galileo's spy-glass if we recall that in his day, as for centuries before, curved glass was the popular contrivance for producing not truth but illusion,   untruth; and if a single curved glass would distort nature, how much more would a pair of them?

Lesson40

Populations increase and decrease relatively not only to one another, but also to natural resources. In most parts of the world, the relation between population and resources is already unfavourable and will probably become even more unfavourable in the future. This growing poverty in the midst of growing poverty constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty. For overpopulation is not compatib1e with freedom. An unfavourable relationship between numbers and resources tends to make the earning of a living almost intolerably difficult. Labour is more abundant than goods, and the individual is compelled to work long hours for little pay. No surplus of accumulated purchasing power stands between him and the tyrannies of unfriendly nature or of the equally unfriendly wielders of political and economic power. Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn. And he cannot be certain of his next meal unless he owns the means of producing enough wealth, for his family to live on, or has been able to accumulate a surplus out of past wages, or has a chance of moving to virgin territories, where he can make a fresh start. In an overcrowded country, very few people own enough to make them financially independent; very few are in a position to accumulate purchasing power; and there is no free land. Moreover, in any country where population presses hard upon natural resources, the general economic situation is apt to be so precarious that government control of capital and labour, production and consumption, becomes inevitable. It is no accident that the twentieth century should be the century of highly centralized governments and totalitarian dictatorships; it had to be so for the simple reason that the twentieth century is the century of planetary overcrowding.

Lesson41

Education is one of the key words of our time. A man without an education, many of us believe, is an unfortunate victim of adverse circumstances deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities. Convinced of the importance of education, modern states 'invest' in institutions of learning to get back 'interest' in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, punctuated by text-books--those purchasable wells of wisdom-- what would civilization be like without its benefits ?

So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers, lawyers and defendants, marriages and births--but our spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on 'facts and figures' and more on a good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow-citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we would have the most democratic form of 'college' imaginable. Among the people whom we like to call savages all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member of the tribe so that in this respect everybody is, equally equipped for life.

It is the ideal condition of the 'equal start' which only our most progressive forms of modern education try to regain. In primitive cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding to all. There are no 'illiterates '--if the term can be applied to peoples without a script--while our own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England in 1876, and is still non-existent in a number of 'civilized' nations. This shows how long it was before we deemed it necessary to make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the 'happy few' during the past centuries.

Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are entitled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry which, in our society, often hampers the full development of a growing personality. There, a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his parents, therefore the jungles and the savannahs know of no 'juvenile delinquency.' No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children, and no father is confronted with his inability to 'buy' an education for his child.

Lesson42

Parents are often upset when their children praise the homes of their friends and regard it as a slur on their own cooking, or cleaning, or furniture, and often are foolish enough to let the adolescents see that they are annoyed. They may even accuse them of disloyalty, or make some spiteful remark about the friends' parents. Such a loss of dignity and descent into childish behaviour on the part of the adults deeply shocks the adolescents, and makes them resolve that in future they will not talk to their parents about the places or people they visit. Before very long the parents will be complaining that the child is so secretive and never tells them anything, but they seldom realize that they have brought this on themselves.

Disillusionment with the parents, however good and adequate they may be both as parents and as individuals, is to some degree inevitable. Most children have such a high ideal of their parents, unless the parents themselves have been unsatisfactory, that it ca hardly hope to stand up to a realistic evaluation. Parents would be greatly surprised and deeply touched if they realize how much belief their children usually have in their character and infallibility, and how much this faith means to a child. If parents were prepared for this adolescent reaction, and realized that it was a sign that the child was growing up and developing valuable powers of observation and independent judgement , they would not be so hurt, and therefore would not drive the child into opposition by resenting and resisting it.

The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity, always respects a parent who admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, or even that he has been unfair or unjust. What the child cannot forgive is the parents' refusal to admit these charges if the child knows them to be true.

Victorian parents believed that they kept their dignity by retreating behind an unreasoning authoritarian attitude; in fact hey did nothing of the kind, but children were then too cowed to let them know how they really felt. Today we tend to go to the other extreme, but on the whole this is a healthier attitude both for the child and the parent. It is always wiser and safer to face up to reality, however painful it may be at the moment.

Lesson43

Faith in controlled nuclear fission is now being shown by the construction of atomic power stations. In Britain, Calder Hall on the coast of Cumberland first made its contribution to the National Electricity grid in 1957. Subsequently a chain of nuclear power stations was planned. Of necessity they are sited near the coasts or tidal water because of the need of much water for cooling and a certain discharge of possible radioactive effluent. Atomic power is associated in the public mind with the destructive force of atom bombs and partly for this reason, though it is claimed that there is no danger to be associated with atomic power stations, they are being sited away from populous centres.

The present position is that the three main sources of power are coal, oil and water power. We sometimes refer to electricity ,gas or petrol as if they were the actual source of power , forgetting that electricity must be generated by the consumption of coal or oil or by the utilization of water power, whilst coke, gas and petrol are examples of secondary fuels by which coal and oil may be more effectively used.

Where alternative sources of power are available there are some marked contrasts in handling. The bulk and weight of coal required in the majority of manufacturing industries is large in comparison with the bulk and weight of other raw materials. This is not always true--was with the manufacture of pig iron and steel from low-grade iron ores-- but it did lead to the concentration of industrial developments on the coal-fields, a phenomenon well seen in such countries as Britain where the Industrial Revolution came before the days of oil or electricity. Coal being a solid must be distributed mainly by rail or water.

By way of contrast oil can be transported large distances by pipeline but overseas movement has involved building of large numbers of tankers, including now some of the largest vessels afloat. Unless suitable on other grounds oilfields have not become industrial regions; on the contrary the oil industry is marked by a certain amount of smell and an element of danger, hence the siting of refineries at a distance from population centres. It is not always realized that the owners of pipelines can handle the oil of different customers, sending it through at different, periods. Natural gas can also be transported large distances by pipe. Early in 1959 Britain received the first ship cargo of natural gas----liquefied for the purpose of transport.

Lesson44

If a nation is essentially disunited, it is left to the government to hold it together. This increases the expense of government, and reduces correspondingly the amount of economic resources that could be used for developing the country, And it should not be forgotten how small those resources are in a poor and backward country. Where the cost of government is high, resources for development are correspondingly low.

This may be illustrated by comparing the position of a nation with that of a private business enterprise. An enterprise has to incur certain costs and expenses in order to stay in business. For our purposes, we are concerned only with one kind of cost--the cost of managing and administering the business. Such administrative overhead in a business is analogous to the cost of government in a nation. The administrative overhead of a business is low to the extent that everyone working in the business can, be trusted to behave in a way that best promotes the interests of the firm. If they can each be trusted to take such responsibilities, and to exercise such initiative as falls within their sphere, then administrative overhead will be low. It will be low because it will be necessary to have only one man looking after each job, without having another man to check upon what he is doing, keep him in line, and report on him to someone else. But if no one can be trusted to act in a loyal and responsible manner towards his job, then the business will require armies of administrators, checkers, and foremen, and administrative overhead will rise correspondingly. As administrative overhead rises, so the earnings of the business, after meeting the expense of administration, will fall; and the business will have less money to distribute as dividends or invest directly in its future progress and development.

It is precisely the same with a nation. To the extent that the people can be relied upon to behave in a loyal and responsible manner, the government does not require armies of police and civil servants to keep them in order. But if a nation is disunited, the government cannot be sure that the actions of the people will be in the interests of the nation; and it will have to watch, check, and control the people accordingly. A disunited nation therefore has to incur unduly high costs of government.

Lesson45

At the age of twelve years, the human body is at its most vigorous. It has yet to reach its full size and strength, and its owner his or her full intelligence; but at this age the likelihood of death is least. Earlier we were infants and young children, and consequently more vulnerable; later, we shall undergo a progressive loss of our vigour and resistance which, though imperceptible at first, will finally become so steep that we can live no longer, however well we look after ourselves, and however well society, and our doctors, look after us. This decline in vigour with the passing of time is called ageing. It is one of the most unpleasant discoveries which we all make that we must decline in this way, that if we escape wars, accidents and diseases we shall eventually die of old age, and that this happens at a rate which differs little from person to person, so that there are heavy odds in favour of our dying between the ages of sixty-five and eighty. Some of us will die sooner, a few will live longer-- on into a ninth or tenth decade. But the chances are against it, and there is a virtual limit on how long we can hope to remain alive, however lucky and robust we are.

Normal people tend to forget this process unless and until they are reminded of it. We are so familiar with the fact that man ages, that people have for years assumed that the process of losing vigour with time, of becoming more likely to die the older we get, was something self-evident, like the cooling of a hot kettle or the wearing-out of a pair of shoes. They have also assumed that all animals, and probably other organisms such as trees, or even the universe itself, must in the nature of things 'wear out'. Most animals we commonly observe do in fact age as we do if given the chance to live long enough; and mechanical systems like a wound watch or the sun, do in fact run out of energy in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics (whether the whole universe does so is a moot point at present). But these are not analogous to what happens when man ages A run-down watch is still a watch and can be rewound. An old watch, by contrast, becomes so worn and unreliable that it eventually is not worth mending. But a watch could never repair itself it does not consist of living parts, only of metal, which wears away by friction. We could, at one time, repair ourselves well enough, at least, to overcome all but the most instantly fatal illnesses an accidents. Between twelve and eighty years we gradually lose this power; an illness which at twelve would knock us over, at eighty can knock us out, and into our grave. If we could stay as vigorous as we are at twelve, it would take about 700 years for half of us to die, and another 700 for the survivors to be reduce by half again.

Lesson46

After millennia of growth so slow that each generation hardly noticed it, the cities are suddenly racing off in every direction. The world population goes up by two per cent a year, city population goes up by four per cent a year, but in big cities the rate may be as much as five and six per cent a year. To give only one example of almost visible acceleration, Athens today grows by three dwellings And 100 square metres of road every hour. There is no reason to believe that this pace will slacken. As technology gradually swallows up all forms of work, industrial and agricultural, the rural areas are going to shrink, just as they have shrunk in Britain, and the vast majority of their people will move into the city. In fact, in Britain now only about four or five per cent of people live in rural areas and depend upon them; all through the developing world the vanguard of the rural exodus has reached the urban fringes already, and there they huddle, migrants in the favellas and barrios of Latin America, in shanty towns in Africa, in those horrifying encampments one sees on the outskirts of Calcutta and Bombay. We are heading towards an urban world.

This enormous increase will go ahead whatever we do, and we have to remember that the new cities devour space. People now acquire far more goods and things. There is a greater density of household goods; they demand more services such as sewage and drainage. Above all the car changes everything: rising incomes and rising populations can make urban car density increase by something like four and five per cent in a decade; traffic flows rise to fill whatever scale of highways are provided for them. The car also has a curious ambivalence: it creates and then it destroys mobility. The car tempts people further out and then gives them the appalling problem of getting back. It makes them believe they can spend Sunday in Brighton, but makes it impossible for them to return before, say, two in the morning. People go further and further away to reach open air and countryside which continuously recedes from them, and just as their working weeks decline and they begin to have more time for leisure, they find they cannot get to the open spaces or the recreation or the beaches which they now have the time to enjoy.

Recently some studies were made in the behaviour of mice when exposed to more than a certain degree of density, frustration, and noise, and the mice just became deranged. I think some sociologists wonder whether it might not be the same for men. This combination of very high density of population, goods and services, and machines, all increasing with almost bruta1 speed, does account for some really antisocial tendencies in modern urban growth.

Lesson47

The modern Plato, like his ancient counterpart, has an unbounded contempt for politicians and statesmen and party leaders who are not university men. He finds politics a dirty game, and only enters them reluctantly because he knows that at the very least he and his friends are better than the present gang. Brought up in the traditions of the ruling classes, he has a natural pity for the common people whom he has learnt to know as servants, and observed from a distance at their work in the factory, at their play in the parks and holiday resorts. He has never mixed with them or spoken to them on equal terms, but has demanded and generally received a respect due to his position and superior intelligence. He knows that if they trust him, he can give them the happiness which they crave. A man of culture, he genuinely despises the self-made industrialist and news-paper-king: with a modest professional salary and a little private income of his own, he regards money-making as vulgar and avoids all ostentation. Industry and finance seem to him to be activities unworthy of gentlemen, although, alas, many are forced by exigencies of circumstance to take some part in them. intellectual, he gently laughs at the superstitions of most Christians, but attends church regularly because he sees the importance of organized religion for the maintenance of sound morality among the lower orders, and because he dislikes the scepticism and materialism of radical teachers. His genuine passions are for literature and the philosophy of science and he would gladly spend all his time in studying them. But the plight of the world compels his unwilling attention, and when he sees that human stupidity and greed are about to plunge .Europe into chaos and destroy the most glorious civilization which the world has known, he feels that it is high time for men of good sense and good will to intervene and to take politics out of the hands of the plutocrats of the Right and the woolly-minded idealists of the Left. Since he and his kind are the only representatives of decency combined with intelligence, they must step down into the arena and save the masses for themselves.

Lesson48

I have known very few writers, but those I have known, and whom I respected, confess at once that they have little idea where they arc going when they first set pen to paper. They have a character, perhaps two, they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration, all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun; one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at school. In the breaking and remaking, in the timing, interweaving, beginning afresh, the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began. This organic process, often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. A blurred image appears, he adds a brushstroke and another, and it is gone; but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books, like adolescents they stand before the mirror, and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, begging response from those around them. Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore.

This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please.

A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. For this reason also the writer, like any other artist, has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort, no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within. A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, and when he flirsts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point.