Explore "Memory Hold-The-Door" by John Buchan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a change with a vengeance. Hitherto I had lived among books and in a society where books were a major interest. My approach to practical life had been from the side of theory. My colleagues had been people with the same background as myself. Now my duties were to be concerned with things for which my education had in no way prepared me, and my daily associates were to be for the most part drawn from worlds of which I had no experience. But in my new vocation I had two advantages. My Oxford circle had had a notable culture, but we did not make too much of it. We cherished it as a private delight, and did not exaggerate its value. We were modest people, anxious to learn, and disposed perhaps to be over-humble in face of an unbookish world. Again, educated society had not absorbed my time, for I had spent long parts of each year among shepherds, gillies, keepers, fishermen, poachers, and other men of their hands, and had a great liking for such company.
I had never been out of Britain -- indeed I had never wanted to. In London I had slipped into a sort of spiritual middle-age. Now, at the age of twenty-five, youth came back to me like a spring tide, and every day on the voyage to the Cape saw me growing younger. As soon as we had passed the Bay of Biscay I seemed to be in a new world, with new scents, new sounds, new sights. I was intoxicated with novelties of which hitherto I had only had glimpses in books. The blue days in tropical waters were a revelation of bodily and mental ease. I recovered the same exhilaration which long ago, as a boy on the Fife coast, I had got from the summer sea. This mood continued until the morning when I looked out of a port-hole and saw Table Mountain rising into the clouds; it was not broken by a week's jolting in a slow train through the Karroo and the dusty Free State; its exhilaration even survived the decanting of a very homesick youth in an unlovely Johannesburg Street at what I suppose to have been the most comfortless hotel in the world.