AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

I never can get enough Nothing to do. I feel as if I had never had leisure to
unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts. I need not say that
there is nothing particularly misanthropic in my desire for isolation; quite the
other way. In my morbid boyhood, as I have said, I was sometimes, in quite a
horrible sense, solitary in society. But in my manhood, I have never felt more
sociable than I do in solitude.
I have already figured here as a lunatic; and have now only to add that I
have occasionally been a happy lunatic as well as an unhappy one. And as I
have mentioned the joy of solitude, it will be suitably erratic to proceed at
once to the joy of many jokes with many companions; and above all, it will be
well to begin with the best of all my companionships. I am not going to
describe my honeymoon, at some of the more comic incidents of which I have
already glanced. After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year
in Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that it was
not to be the real place of our abode. I remember that we strolled out one day,
for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a
voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled “Hanwell”
and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen, we boarded it and left it
somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticketoffice
where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, “Where do
you want to go to?” And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder,
“Wherever the next train goes to.” It seemed that it went to Slough; which
may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough,
and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going.
And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort
of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of
the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it
was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, “This
is the sort of place where some day we will make our home.”
The things that come back to me in my memory, as most worth doing and
worth remembering, are all sorts of absurd interludes and escapades with my
companions, full of their conversation and coloured with their characters.
Belloc still awaits a Boswell. His vivacious and awakening personality has
shown all the continuity of Dr. Johnson’s; and though he has had personal
sorrow and in later years not a little solitude, he was fully entitled to say, like
the man in his own song,
For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three,
A loud voice for singing and clear eyes to see
And a spouting fount of life within that never yet has dried.
Bentley or Conrad Noel were characters who could have been put into any