Отрывок из книги
John Daniel Robins
Published by Good Press, 2021
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We ploughed down the gravel of the track grading, and out upon the richness of a genuine though miniature trail. The quality of remoteness in space differs from that of remoteness in time, and I know of nothing that illustrates this better than a trail. The roar of humanity, dulled through remoteness in space, is still raucous with pain and menace and cultivated lusts, but the poignancy in the low murmur of the remote in time has lost the tones of pain and menace. Temporal continuity is as inescapable as spatial continuity, and indeed the chain of being through time is more readily recognized than the vast enmeshing of the continuum in space, but the mind of man requires very little aid to set up its little partition between the present and the past. On the trail, a gentle shower, effacing the sharp outline of a boot-sole in the mud; a single leaf, fallen carelessly across a track; the tiny, patient erosions of two quiet days—any of these will create the illusion of infinite remoteness between the man on the trail and his predecessor. That illusion once set up, he revels in the silent communion with all who have gone before, in the concave path, the healed-over blaze, the entroughed leaves, the brown powdered punk, even in the dim places where the foot feels the trail rather than the eye sees it.
We passed joyously along this trail and through an open camp-site to the water’s edge. Beside the river, here peaceful and sedgy after the turmoil of the rapids, we sank on the ground by our discharged loads and looked rapturously at each other. The trip was about to begin. On the railroad we had had no sense of being in the bush, no ecstasy. Although we had seen nobody along the track, we had still been hearing the hideous clangour of humanity. We were not yet away from the railroad, for it ran parallel to the river for the first five miles of our course, if one may call two lines parallel which occasionally come into sight of each other. Moreover, we had to go back over that track for the rest of our stuff. Even so, this was one of the special moments of the trip. Another would be at this same spot, when we should push off from shore. There would be still others, to be duly solemnized at the proper time.
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