The Middle of the Road
The following is a quote from my common-place book from 1996. I still like it.
[He] was the true incarnation of the obvious and natural young man, and it was far better to be exactly like that, to walk and skip down the very middle of the road, than peer and sidle away into the shadowed margin....Wasn't it rather this host of perfectly normal people, who had by their sheer weight kept back all chance of enlightenment? There they all marched along in the middle of the road, singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" without any notion of what Christianity or fighting meant, except that you were kind and bluff and hearty and taught the village boys to resist the temptations to which you had yourself succumbed. But anyone who imagined that there were strange little-known districts in the hinterland of the human spirit, who ventured on the dubious and secluded places, was to them an object of slightly contemptuous pity. They were quite certain of themselves: they knew that there were no shy wild beasts which lived in the forests, just as they knew that there were no unicorns....
E. F. Benson, The Inheritor, page 56-57