I imagine we have been to the brink of doom, if not doomsday, many times, and never noticed, simply because we skirted the threshold without tipping over. I wonder, too, how many times we have been on the edge of great things, but the chance was missed, and we stayed behind the line on this side of the tremendum. Things that happen which seem improbable, the freak occurrences — they seem to me not so out of the ordinary, if I consider it. For it is that they almost happen all of the time, are constantly about to occur. “If only,” I believe, is the common vocabulary of the universe. Many an enterprise of great pith and moment has turned awry, I think, by a simple wave of the hand, a shake of the head. And the one step you didn’t take, and thought nothing of later — perhaps this is why you are still alive, thinking about this and that; to live as we do on the borders of the terrific.