From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or——-” And from this beginning—but the story is too fruity, too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
[Original]
