It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other
things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which
would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen.
For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many
interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any
of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends
of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten
thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate,
not fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents
(what there were of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere
of the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing.
I remember them vividly, and they were as I shall now describe.

. . . . .

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing
outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London.
And for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind
or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice
fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step
out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London.
I do not know if other people are made like me in this matter;
but to me it is always dreary weather, what may be called
useless weather, that slings into life a sense of action and romance.
On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world
is complete and beautiful, a thing for contemplation. I no more
ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for
adventures in church. But when the background of man's life is
a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,