'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

I’m reading another book by C.E. Montague, a collection of travel essays, The Right Place: A Book of Pleasures (Chatto & Windus, 1924). Montague gets a little rhapsodic on occasion and requires a periodic calming down, but the man survived the Great War and would die in 1928 at age sixty-one so I’m happy to make allowances. Montague begins his “Overture” by entering through the back door: “You may wonder how it will feel, to find you are old, and able to travel no more. Perhaps to sit out, with your legs up, in an invalid chair on a lawn when the warm weather comes, and to finger a book of time-tables for trains, and to think how at this hour the day express from Paris is probably nearing Mulhouse and the evening freshness of air that has blown across snow is coming in at the windows; soon the train will be slowing to clank into the station at Bale just when the first lamps are lit in the town and look gay in the twilight.” Yes, I know the feeling, with a different emphasis and…