Explore "The Extra Day" by Algernon Blackwood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Tim's "particular adventure" was of another kind. It was a self-repeater of some violence, moreover, when the smallness of the hero is considered. Whether in after-life he become an astronomer-poet or a "silver-and-mechanical engineer" both dreams of his he will ever be sharp upon rescuing something. A lost star or a burning mine will be his objective, but with the essential condition that it be unattainable. Achievement would mean lost interest. For Tim's desire was, is, and ever will be insatiable. Profoundest mystery, insoluble difficulty, and endless searching were what his soul demanded of life. For him all ponds were bottomless, all gipsies older than the moon. He felt the universe within him, and was born to seek its inexplicable "explanation" outside. The realisation of such passion, however, is not necessarily confined to writers of epics and lyrics. Tim was a man of action before he was a poet.
"Forever questing" was his unacknowledged motto. Besides asking questions about stars and other inaccessible incidents of his Cosmos, he liked to "go busting about," as he called it again with one essential condition that the thing should never come to an end by merely happening. Its mystery must remain its beauty.