Last week I did a thing which you may call hackneyed or unhackneyed,
according to your way of life. To some people an excursion to Hampstead
Heath is a unique adventure: to others, a walk around the summit of
Popocatapetl is all in the year’s work. I went to Switzerland and spent
Easter on the top of a mountain. At any rate, the mountain was less
hackneyed at that season than Rome or Seville, where the price of beds
rises in proportion as religious emotion falls. It was Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus who sent me to the mountain. To mention Marcus Aurelius is
almost as clear a sign of priggish affectation and tenth-rate preciosity
as to quote Omar Khayyam; and I may interject defensively that I prefer
Epictetus, the slave, to Marcus Aurelius, the neurotic emperor. Still,
it was Marcus Aurelius who sent me to the mountain. He advised me, in
certain circumstances, to climb high and then look down at human nature.