Tremendous Trifles | Page 3

may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before
us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their
meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the
Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may
see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the giant
in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many
extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can
spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have
taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made
an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in
walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says
that these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can
only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says
that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it
is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of
manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I
would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one
has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.
I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting
to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the
most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an

exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth.
But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but
a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at
his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level
that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that
celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence
cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is
absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this
moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the
marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of
them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders;
but only for want of wonder.
II
A Piece of Chalk
I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a
walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket. I
then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),
and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown
paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook
the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She
seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be
wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do;
indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental
capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of
toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only
wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in
the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question,
not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing
comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I
wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper,
apparently supposing that I did my notes and correspondence on old
brown paper wrappers from motives of economy.
I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only
liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I

liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the
peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight
of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you
can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and
sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.
All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and