The Station: Travels to the Holy Mountain of Greece

Letters from foreign countries arrive in the afternoon. Each envelope advertises a break in the monotony of days; each reveals on penetration only one more facet of a standard world. But latterly another kind has come, strangely addressed, stranger still within. We learn, runs one, that you are safely returned to your own glorious country and are already in the midst of your dearest ones, enjoying the best of health...PS. We have experienced no cold this year hitherto. I am proud, says another, that the all-bountiful God has allowed us to see you again...May he guard you from all evil, world without end. Send me from England ten metres of black stuff that I may make a gown. As the unfamiliar hieroglyphics resolve, memory evokes the senders, their fellows, and the weeks of their company. Till the whole excursion into their impalpable world stands defined as the limits of a sleep. But the experience, being personal, is framed in a larger retrospect. The colour of their environment lives by contrast with my own. Without that measure, its romance fades away.