10.4.
12.17.
132
THE EQUINOX
down a long putt or a tricky one.
Whether it means
more than that perception and execution have got
into unison (for once) and know it, I cannot say.)
It is well that thus should close this eleventh day of my
Retirement, and the thirty-third year of my life.
Thirty and three years was this templein building.
.
.
.
It has always been my custom on this night to look
back over the year, and to ask: What have I done?
The answer is invariably “ Nothing.”
Yet ofwhat men count deeds I have done no small share.
I have travelled abit, written abit
.
,
. I seem to have
been hard at it all the time—and to have got nothing
finished or successful.
One Tragedy—one little comedy—two essays—a dozen
poems or so—two or three short stories—odds and ends
of one sort and another: it’s a miserable record, though
the Tragedy is good enough to last a life.
It marks an
epoch in literature, though nobody else will guess it
for fifty years yet.
The travel, too, has been rubbish.
It’s been a petty,
peddling year.
The one absolute indication is:
on no account live
otherwise than alone.
But it is 1035; these considerations, though in a way
pertaining to the Work, are not the Work itself.
Let me begin to inflame myselfinfraying!
The Twelfth Day
When therefore I had made ready the chamber, so that
all was dark, save for the Lamp upon the Altar,
I