slackening the bonds of destiny

"The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope."

~~ John Buchan


"Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective."

~~ John Buchan

____________________

One of President John F. Kennedy's favorite books was a memoir written by John Buchan.

     Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian, and Unionist politician.

   The memoir JFK loved (he gave copies to his friends and loved ones, including Jacqueline Bouvier when they were dating) was originally published as Memory Hold-the-door; it was published in the United States with the title, Pilgrim's Way.

[excerpt 1] ------------- This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory.  As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind.  

We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span.  


The abiding things lie in the past, and the mind busies itself with what Henry James has called "the irresistible reconstruction, to the all too baffled vision, of irrevocable presences and aspects, the conscious, shining, mocking void, sad somehow with excess of serenity."

     Such a research is not a mere catalogue of memories.  I have no new theory of Time to propound, but I would declare my belief that it preserves and quickens rather than destroys.  An experience, especially in youth, is quickly overlaid by others, and is not at the moment fully comprehended.  


But it is overlaid, not lost.  Time hurries it from us, but also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its savour.

     These chapters are so brazenly egotistic that my first intention was to have them privately printed.  But I reflected that a diary of a pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of life, might interest others who travel a like road.  


It is not a book of reminiscences in the ordinary sense, for my purpose has been to record only a few selected experiences....

[excerpt 2] -------------- CHAPTER I -- WOOD, WATER AND HILL

...Under their tuition I learned to carve ship models for myself, and became learned in the matter of sails and rigging and types of vessels.  But my interest was less in seamanship than in the unknown lands which could be reached by ships.  

I became aware of the largeness of the globe.  

At the time I collected foreign stamps, and to this day the smell of gum, with which I plastered them in an album, brings back to me that spacious awakening.

     The woods were, on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinistic heavens.  Their world was an arena of pilgrimage, romantic, exciting, mysterious, but governed by an inexorable law.  


The sea also invited to pilgrimage, but how different!  It offered a world sunlit and infinitely varied.  All the things which fascinated me in books -- tropic islands, forests of strange fruits, snow mountains, ports thronged with queer shipping and foreign faces -- lay somewhere beyond the waters in which I swam with indifferent skill.  

I never attempted to harmonise the two worlds -- I never wanted to.  But that summer shore was a wholesome emancipation.  It seemed to slacken the bonds of destiny and enlarge the horizon.

-30-