But now, now, the deficiency which I note in chief (like the superior
officer of a disastrously wrecked crew) lies in the fact that what I had
meant to be the main "point" of "Figures of Earth," while explicitly
enough stated in the book, remains for every practical end
indiscernible.... For I have written many books during the last quarter
of a century. Yet this is the only one of them which began at one
plainly recognizable instant with one plainly recognizable imagining. It
is the only book by me which ever, virtually, came into being, with its
goal set, and with its theme and its contents more or less
pre-determined throughout, between two ticks of the clock.

Egotism here becomes rather unavoidable. At Dumbarton Grange the library
in which I wrote for some twelve years was lighted by three windows set
side by side and opening outward. It was in the instant of unclosing one
of these windows, on a fine afternoon in the spring of 1919, to speak
with a woman and a child who were then returning to the house (with the
day's batch of mail from the post office), that, for no reason at all, I
reflected it would be, upon every personal ground, regrettable if, as
the moving window unclosed, that especial woman and that particular
child proved to be figures in the glass, and the window opened upon
nothingness. For that, I believed, was about to happen. There would be,
I knew, revealed beyond that moving window, when it had opened all the
way, not absolute darkness, but a gray nothingness, rather sweetly
scented.... Well! there was not. I once more enjoyed the quite familiar
experience of being mistaken. It is gratifying to record that nothing
whatever came of that panic surmise, of that second-long nightmare--of
that brief but over-tropical flowering, for all I know, of
indigestion,--save, ultimately, the 80,000 words or so of this book.