Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting
to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call
Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my
readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the
pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'
MORE TRIVIA
REASSURANCE
I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance;
for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when
yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves
buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable
aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one
person.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound
consideration.
Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all
around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
adventure out into that dangerous world again?
Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
THE BEATIFIC VISION
Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.
One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back
like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.
FACES
Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
daydream-larder.
Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
up and down Piccadilly.
THE OBSERVER
Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
human insects I like to note and study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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