All this is worth while in the science of living. It is part of a true tramping jaunt to come back from Nature to man, not of need to civilization, but to men and women and children. The village children will prove as near to the wanderer’s heart as the birds in the woods—nearer, for they are wood fairies incarnate, trapped on the edge of the forest and made to live human lives in the villages.
The written pages of your notebook grow in the village, on the long halt, as do also the unwritten yet unfading memories within. Days and weeks tramping in the open crystallize in impression, and your past is like a tapestry on your bedroom wall. There is a space cleared for human life and love and happiness, for dance and for song, for sociality and talk.
Here is opportunity for learning new ways of life and new stories and songs. You may soak in folklore and folk music for weeks. How splendid for you if, when the time comes to go away and resume your trampings you can carry away with you drawings you have made, songs you have learned to sing, stories which you can tell. You will carry that village with you to the ends of the earth.
And then, of course, a village is not merely a village, not merely the broad and rutted roads and the cottages planted among the pigs and fowls. The village has its ways out, its views, its hillsides and streams, its loveliness on all sides. Your long halt is not a sitting still in a human settlement, but a starwise tour of all the country round about.
Going on and on in a line of route has its drawbacks. The world is not a straight line, not even a crooked line, not even the line of a man’s steps upon it—it is an area, a broad surface. Length cannot exist without some measure of breadth, but at the risk of a paradox one may say the world is breadth without length.
So also man’s life. We think of it in length of years. But that in a way is error. Life is not length of time, but breadth of human experience. Life is not a chain of events, but an area-something spreading out from a hidden center and welling at once towards all points of the compass.
In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain—deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.
Belike you have a child’s happiness into which you are unwilling to probe. You ask not whether it is more in one thing than in another. You tramp and you are happy, and halt and you are happy. Or happiness is not your word for what you feel, not your vein. You muse, you are at one with life, you are content, you ask only to go on in the way in which you are. Or your happiness is to feel a divine melancholy wherever you are. It is the same for all. The long halt, the dwelling among strange kindred, the choosing of some spot to be beloved in preference for a while—that also enters into the art of life, of the life of the true Bohemian and life-wanderer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO