Since September 3rd, my day-dreams have suffered a change. This
change is significant. Until September 3rd last my fantasies were all projected into the future and were about things which might happen a few years from now. Since then, they have shifted into the past. That tremulous, and I admit flabby, fibre of the imagination which creates day-dreams actually shrinks away from any contemplation of the future. The unpleasantnesses of the next ten years are as a wall of concrete through which the rays of fantasy are unable to pierce. They are rejected into the past. And since the alteration of the past is demon- strably impossible, they have about them, not the sweet intoxication of future possibility, but the bitter ashes of past frustration. It is all most uncomfortable. The architec- tural day-dream remains with me and I still plan "d'impos- sibles Ecbatanes " in Kenya Colony or in Southern Rhodesia. There is a particularly fine city which I have built upon the shores of Lake Baringo, where the rose-red Government buildings, plus both the Protestant and the Catholic cathedrals, rise above the escarpment and the city itself sweeps down to the waters of that flamingo lake with the great mass of Mount Kenya visible (upon clear days) in the distance. In spite of the declaration of war I still fiddle with South London and argue with myself whether the shot-towers should, or should not be abolished. I decided, last time, that they should not.
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