think of all the tales
that have been told, and well told
you will never know
Everyday the sun rises.
Everyday the sun sets.
(I have to remark on that line by remembering a young waitress at the restaurant at Amicalola Falls State Park & Lodge in Dawsonville, GA, who stopped taking our order to get out her phone and snap a photo of the sunset saying, ‘You don’t see a sunset everyday!’ The moment reinforced what I had read earlier in the day when I checked on the reviews of this restaurant that most mentioned in some way the unique character of the staff. But I digress.)
The tide comes in and washed the beach here twice a day leaving a clean sweep of sand with no footprints or evidence of any body being there before.
But when Winston Churchill wrote, Think of all the wonderful tales that have been told, and well told, which you will never know, he was not referring to the march of time across the span of the days of mankind.
He was thinking only of the efforts of this human race to document the passage of time in books.
In an essay titled Hobbies, which my research seems to show was published originally in the Strand Magazine in either 1921 or 1922 together with his essay Painting as a Pastime and then reprinted in a collection of Churchill’s essay’s titled, Thoughts and Adventures, (Odhams Press, LTD. London, 1932) and now available at Fadepage.com, Mr. Churchill wrote:
But a day in a library, even of modest dimensions, quickly dispels these illusory sensations.
As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely-varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness.
As one surveys the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treasures one will never be able to admire — still less enjoy — the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.
Think of all the wonderful tales that have been told, and well told, which you will never know.
Think of all the searching inquiries into matters of great consequence which you will never pursue.
Think of all the delighting or disturbing ideas that you will never share.
Think of the mighty labours which have been accomplished for your service, but of which you will never reap the harvest.
But from this melancholy there also comes a calm.
The bitter sweets of a pious despair melt into an agreeable sense of compulsory resignation from which we turn with renewed zest to the lighter vanities of life.
Reading.
To read.
And yet …
I guess when I think about reading under attack, just writing those words is a like a smack in the face, I can’t do much more than to remember the bitter sweets of a pious despair melt into an agreeable sense of compulsory resignation from which we turn with renewed zest to the lighter vanities of life.
In the forward to the book, Mr. Churchill leaves as an epigram:
Le monde est vieux, dit-on: je le crois; cependant
Il le font amuser encor comme un enfant.
I had to look it up but it translates:
The world is old, they say: I believe it; However …
They still make him have fun like a child.
