For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil.[31] What he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical recovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the soul. If modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation stems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly indicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the reality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man. By industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged in factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical personality who has been fashioned by the age—a wound that few if any of us have escaped. Without a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be. The drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his finding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings; he drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something demanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily to the cruelties of the moment. Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things.... Not only death ... but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability ... the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety, honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were, the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.[32]