La Colline des Rêves (2)

"And here I would say that to the best of my belief, I was brought to a dead stop precisely because I had explored the way and laid it out so thoroughly. I have told how I rolled the 'notion' up and down and round about in my mind ; how I planned and plotted and blew up the rocks and cut away the brushwood and felled the trees, so that there should be no difficulties in the track ; and there was the mischief of it. For the truth is, that for me at any rate literature is always an exploration. The relish of it, the delight of it are indissolubly bound up with the sense of penetrating into a new world and an undiscovered region, of standing on some minor peak in Darien and looking on worlds that no eye has ever seen before. And this must be the sense of the scene as the actual words are written, as the ink flows from the pen -- or else there is nothing written that matters two straws. And in the affair of this particular book, I had taken such pains in exploring the ground that then I came to write it, there was nothing left to explore. Here were no miracles, no mysteries, no buried treasures, no unlooked for wonders. Everything was known, everything familiar, all seemed quite devoid of significance.
Still, that book had got to be written, and was going to be written. "