Footsteps

Excellent travelogue and literary discovery.

It is how every traveller feels at the approach of night, and the lighting up of windows in houses where he does not belong, and cannot enter in.

But the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

The light was fading and there was a smell of damp leaves that reminded me of England. The wind stirred and dropped, and everything was still.

… livre de poche of Nerval, with marks of coffee-cups on the cover. For the first time—in that pungent half-light, with the rain suddenly beating on the windows—I read the poem of his life, “El Desdichado” (“The Disinherited”), which begins: Je suis le Ténébreux,—le Veuf—L’Inconsolé, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie: Ma seule Etoile est morte—et mon luth constellé Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.