chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens
the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory,
its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I,
sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air
that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table
littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes
about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories--of an
altogether different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.

II

I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is
any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I've given, I
see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes
and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump
of victual. I'll own that here, with the pen already started, I realise
what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and
theories formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my
book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really trying to
render is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man has found it. I
want to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say
things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages,
and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and
lured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels.
I've got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take on
shapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for
dreaming, but interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising,
novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine--my one novel--without
having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the
regular novel-writer acquires.