Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography; Waugh, Alec, 1898-1981
And so the day would pass. At your office you would forget matters that
an hour earlier you had settled, and you would seek information of them
from your secretary. As the sun sank eastwards you would grow less
hungry. You would indeed feel increasingly comfortable till you found
yourself at the breakfast table and were forced to watch your empty
plate become filled with kidneys and bacon and tomatoes. Finally, after
you had bathed and had shaved, and in the process had restored to your
chin its rough, bristly appearance, you would be lying in bed,
clear-eyed, fresh, ready for the day’s work; you would be watching the
sun sink slowly behind a bank of cloud: “A glorious day,” you would say
to yourself. You would watch the maid move quietly about the room; she
would lower the blinds; the room would become dark. You would feel a
little dazed, a little drowsy. For a moment you would wonder where you
were. There would be a loud knock upon the door; you would find yourself
in the bitter throes of a nightmare; its agony would pass. You would
drift into a deep, untroubled sleep.
But that, you will say, is an ordinary, and on the whole rather
unromantic day. It is the hour of stress, of delirium, of turmoil, that
if the past is to be relived you would ask to see again. Let the
operator have done, you say, with this traffic of routine. Let us be
transported to something of greater matter. We must make a choice? To
the hour, then, of that first dance together, to that hour of which the
memory can never leave us; to that hour than which we have known nothing
fresher, keener, more romantic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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