We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at
every turn, only they are too trivial even for conversation.
A man named Williams did walk into a strange house and murder
a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
A journalist of my acquaintance did move quite unconsciously
from a place called Overstrand to a place called Overroads.
When he had made this escape he was very properly pursued by a
voting card from Battersea, on which a political agent named
Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named Burns.
And when he did so another coincidence happened to him:
rather a spiritual than a material coincidence; a mystical thing,
a matter of a magic number.
For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote
in Battersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind.
As the train slid through swampy woods and sullen skies there came
into his empty mind those idle and yet awful questions which come when
the mind is empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them; knaves make
profane poems out of them; men try to crush them like an ugly lust.
Religion is only the responsible reinforcement of common courage
and common sense. Religion only sets up the normal mood of health
against the hundred moods of disease.
But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they always
have an answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason.
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