One Could Do With A Longer Year

One Day I Shall Write A Little Book Of Conduct Myself, And I Shall Call It Social Problems Of The Unsociable. And The Root Problem, Beneath A Hundred Varying Manifestions, Is How To Escape. How To Escape, That Is, At Those Times, Be They Few Or Frequent, When You Want To Keep Yourself To Yourself.

How Agreeable To Watch, From The Other Side Of The High Stile, This Mighty Creature, This Fat Bull Of Bashan, Snorting, Champing, Pawing The Earth, Lashing The Tail, Breathing Defiance At Heaven And At Me ... His Heart Hot With Hate, Unable To Climb A Stile.

Every Year, In The Deep Midwinter, There Descends Upon This World A Terrible Fortnight. ... Every Shop Is A Choked Mass Of Humanity ... Nerves Are Jangled And Frayed, Purses Emptied To No Purposes, All Amusements And All Occupations Suspended In Favor Of Frightful Businesses With Brown Paper, String, Letters, Cards, Stamps, And Crammed Post Offices. This Period Is Doubtless A Foretaste Of Whatever Purgatory Lies In Store For Human Creatures.

Words, Living And Ghostly, The Quick And The Dead, Crowd And Jostle The Otherwise Too Empty Corridors Of My Mind ... To Move Among This Bright, Strange, Often Fabulous Herd Of Beings, To Summon Them At My Will, To Fasten Them On To Paper Like Flies, That They May Decorate It, This Is The Pleasure Of Writing.

As To The Family, I Have Never Understood How That Fits In With The Other Ideals -- Or, Indeed, Why It Should Be An Ideal At All.