to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river banks.
Nor this alone: something inside my mind, a
part of my brain, a province of my proper being, had
thrown off allegiance and set up for itself, or perhaps
for the somebody else who did the paddling.
I had dwindled into quite a little thing in a corner
of myself. I was isolated in my own skull.
Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were
not my thoughts, they were plainly some one else’s;
and I considered them like a part of the landscape.
I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana
as would be convenient in practical life; and if this
be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments;
’tis an agreeable state, not very consistent
with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a
money point of view, but very calm, golden, and incurious,
and one that sets a man superior to alarms.
It may be best figured by supposing yourself to get
dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it.
I have a notion that open-air labourers must spend
a large portion of their days in this ecstatic stupor,
which explains their high composure and endurance.
A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here
is a better paradise for nothing!
This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage,
take it all in all. It was the farthest piece
of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies so far
from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting
the reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent
idiocy of my condition; when ideas came and went like
motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along
the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice,
like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when
the rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water
became a cradle-song to lull my thoughts asleep; when
a piece of mud on the deck was sometimes an intolerable
eyesore, and sometimes quite a companion for me, and
the object of pleased consideration;—and
all the time, with the river running and the shores
changing upon either hand, I kept counting my strokes
and forgetting the hundreds, the happiest animal in
France.
We made our first stage below Compiegne to Pont Sainte
Maxence. I was abroad a little after six the
next morning. The air was biting, and smelt
of frost. In an open place a score of women
wrangled together over the day’s market; and
the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and querulous
like that of sparrows on a winter’s morning.
The rare passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled
in their wooden shoes to set the blood agog.
The streets were full of icy shadow, although the
chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine.
If you wake early enough at this season of the year,
you may get up in December to break your fast in June.
