There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It is however a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I never wrote. Like
every book I never wrote it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm or cottage stood on such a slope and who went on his travels to find something such
as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and quarterings of a shield were but parts of some such gigantic figure on which he had always lived but which was too large and too close to be seen. That I think is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.