Chapter 2

I cannot make it a book of reminiscences, because I can remember
nothing for more than about two days, and also because I will not
write about my contemporaries for fear of offending them. They are
very good fellows, they have no particular characters or talents, they
do nothing lasting, they are a generation of saltless butter with too
much skim milk about it, there is little to say about them, and almost
anything one says gives the little fellows offence. I would not call
it ‘Opinions,’ because I have none either, only convictions; and if I
called it ‘Convictions’ I might be misunderstood. I tell you I do not
know what to call this book, but I am dedicating it to you because it
has at least this parallel with your work that it is all about things
that have passed through my mind.

Indeed, the naming of a book has always seemed to me a thing fastidious
in both senses; that is, both a thing wearisome and a thing of picking
and choosing. I am not quite sure that books ought to be named at all.
If they were numbered, like the streets in America, they would be very
much easier to catalogue and shelf (or shelve) and remember the places
of. Thus your next book or so might be ‘Baring 32,’ and this ‘Belloc
106.’ And why not? It would in no way diminish their souls, their
connotations. Cannot a man be head over ears in love with Number 15,
Parham Street, and sick of 30, Tupton Square? I can!

Numbers, I say, leave us free to give personality and emotions to
things. An anniversary is but a numbered day in a month, yet it shakes
a man more than any feast name.

So should it be with books. When they are named, they give a false
indication; moreover, the vast crowd of books that are poured out in
this our day like fugitives from a plague-stricken city is so immense
that the discovery of a new title is impossible. However, it will have
a title before I have done, stap me, and it is dedicated to you.

At this point I ought to end; but, as I have already told you, it
is in the very character of this book, of its essence, nature, and
personality, that it has only an accidental beginning, no real end,
and nothing in particular between the two. It is like those rivers of
the Middle West which trickle out of a marsh, and then wander aimless,
without banks or shape, mere wetnesses, following the lowest land until
they reach the shapeless Mississippi, and at last the flats and mud of
a steaming sea.

What a book!…

My mind now suggests to me (for my mind is separate from myself, and
may properly be regarded as no more than an inconsequent companion)
that I should do very well not to cut off the Dedication from the rest
of the Opus. The putting of a dedication separately from a book has
something about it of form; and form is just what I have to avoid. I am
to wander at large, setting down such things as pass before my eyes of
memory, leaving out pretty well all that is of importance (reserving
that for posthumous publication), and doing no more than present this,
that, or the other, of ephemeral things. For there comes a time in life
after which a man discovers no more, has lost through the effect of
the years the multitude of what he possessed both within and without,
can only repeat phrases or decisions already well worn. He is fixed,
sterilised, hardened, and has nothing left to say; that is the moment
in which he is expected to set down, for the benefit of others, the
full treasury of what was once his soul.

Some two to five years ago there was an outburst of books in England
which I myself labelled (and, I think, justly) ‘The Cads’ Concert.’
These were books in which men set down their connection with their
fellows, giving each by name familiarly, purported to publish diaries
which they had never kept, maligned the dead, insulted the living, and
lied impudently upon both. They had a great sale, had these books,
because they brought in rich or otherwise important men and women,
known already by newspapers vaguely to the readers of such books, so
that those readers had from ‘The Cads’ Concert’ a faint reflection of
High Life.

It was something quite new in the history of letters, and had, I am
glad to say, a very short life. I do not propose to add one more
vileness to that nasty little list.

How then should I approach this task which has been set me of writing
down, in the years between fifty and sixty, some poor scraps of
judgment and memory? I think I will give it the name of a Cruise;
for it is in the hours when he is alone at the helm, steering his
boat along the shores, that a man broods most upon the past, and most
deeply considers the nature of things. I think I will also call it
by the name of my boat, the Nona, and give the whole book the title
‘The Cruise of the Nona,’ for, in truth, the Nona has spent her years,
which are much the same as mine (we are nearly of an age, the darling,
but she a little younger, as is fitting), threading out of harbours,
taking the mud, trying to make further harbours, failing to do so,
getting in the way of more important vessels, giving way to them,
taking the mud again, waiting to be floated off by the tide, anchoring
in the fairway, getting cursed out of it, dragging anchor on shingle
and slime, mistaking one light for another, rounding the wrong buoy,
crashing into other people, and capsizing in dry harbours. It seemed to
me, as I considered the many adventures and misadventures of my boat,
that here was a good setting for the chance thoughts of one human life;
since all that she has done and all that a man does make up a string of
happenings and thinkings, disconnected and without shape, meaningless,
and yet full: which is Life.