Why Is Humanity So Excessive In The

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. A Group Of Closely Related Persons Living Under One Roof; It Is A Convenience, Often A Necessity, Sometimes A Pleasure, Sometimes The Reverse; But Who First Exalted It As Admirable, An Almost Religious Ideal?

Cranks Live By Theory, Not By Pure Desire. They Want Votes, Peace, Nuts, Liberty, And Spinning-looms Not Because They Love These Things, As A Child Loves Jam, But Because They Think They Ought To Have Them. That Is One Element Which Makes The Crank.

We Know One Another's Faults, Virtues, Catastrophes, Mortifications, Triumphs, Rivalries, Desires, And How Long We Can Each Hang By Our Hands To A Bar. We Have Been Banded Together Under Pack Codes And Tribal Laws.

Life Is One Long Struggle To Disinter Oneself, To Keep One's Head Above The Accumulations, The Ever Deepening Layers Of Objects ... Which Attempt To Cover One Over, Steadily, Almost Irresistibly, Like Falling Snow.

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.