I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,even so I will endure_For already have I suffered full much,and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.Let this be added to the tale of those.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.