But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is
so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a
very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at
whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn
closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as
one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from
without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some
mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more
desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.

As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
drinking after I had passed the frontier.