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 I put the brown
paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical
are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,
for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things
in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age
of the great epics is past.

. . . . .

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper,
I went out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal
contours that express the best quality of England, because they
are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them
has the same meaning as the smoothness of great