1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 386

We, the human, ourselves, the old fellow peopl, as we wandered where from, the wide world-wishing which we thought we had known in our fuller impulsions of spirit. But one morning a week or two later I looked around with questioning eye on the faces in our curious return-sweep towards ether - they seemd dead, tho' thit had occurred to me before. The mines of memory were perhaps worked out, however glittering. I ran across a name of lodes whose very exhaust was still an entricement. The window clocks showed all too well how the earth revolved away from some of that early magnificence. The names were valiant names. Was there anything to show for it all to-day - in poetry or books? The little I had a chance of reading was a shifting re-arrangement of mutations misread rather than the first felicity and certitude, when words meant something because they implicated things directly, out of Renaissance vision and linguistic invention. The renaissance is something to talk to oneself about probably before it was quill'd upon. Is there nevertheless a foretasting in our last air of some of its original gesture? It was a world of wax, despite its distraction.