I am reading Pilgrim's Way again, for its spiritual solace. It is prominently subtitled "An Essay in Recollection." The first sentence of the Preface: "This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory."

John Buchan had a prodigious intellect. But however prodigious, the mind is faulty. Especially in recollection. I have experienced the mind's faults, especially in recollection. I have learned to grow wary. Experiences "rebuilt out of memory" are rebuilt with sand.

Buchan was a learned man. On the great texts of Christianity he was raised, his father was a Calvinist minister; read and reread, those books were the foundation for his life-long generous, salving philosophy of soul. But he was still a human being with that beguiling, mysterious, faulty organ, the brain.

"...the noble Scriptural cadences had their own meaning for me, quite apart from their proper interpretation. The consequence was that I built up a Bible world of my own and placed it in the woods.

"From it I excluded the more gracious pictures, the rejoicing 'little hills,' the mountains that 'clapped their hands,'..."

That is on the fourth page of the first chapter, Wood, Water, and Hill. In the margin from a prior reading,

Wrong! Psalm 98.8: 'Let the rivers clap their hands'

I laughed out loud.

I have read Pilgrim's Way so many times that I have had the leisure to check the solidity of Buchan's remembered experiences. This was the first that I found rebuilt honestly but faultily.