This is how we go on

“This is how we go on” is a refrain about endurance through small, repeated acts. It moves from daily necessities to the writer’s page, presenting continuation not as a single triumph but as the work of turning toward the next task while fear remains close.

The Pattern of Continuation

The passage builds its principle through parallel examples: people proceed one day, meal, pain, and breath at a time; dentists handle one root canal at a time, and boat-builders make one hull at a time. Writing belongs to the same pattern. A book advances one page at a time, reducing an overwhelming undertaking to the next practicable unit.

The examples widen beyond work and bodily need. People study catalogues, watch football, make ordinary choices between telephone services, and count birds. Such habits do not resolve fear or explain it away; they give attention somewhere concrete to go while life continues.

Fear and Refusal to Turn Away

The refrain’s steadiness is tested by the image of footsteps coming up the hall. The passage describes people refusing to turn from the window when they hear them, even as something approaches. They may acknowledge that clouds resemble fish, unicorns, or men on horseback, but insist that they are still only clouds—even when lightning flashes inside them. The contrast makes denial and composure difficult to separate: the language of ordinary reassurance persists alongside an unmistakable sign of danger.

That tension gives the refrain its weight. Going on is neither proof that the threat is unreal nor a promise that it will disappear. Instead, attention returns to the next meal, pain, breath, or page. The repeated list converts endurance into a rhythm, each ordinary act carrying the person forward without claiming that fear has been overcome.

Writing as an Instance of the Refrain

The surrounding scene gives the maxim a concrete application. After deciding to leave immediately, the narrator is, an hour later, back in a stifling study, dressed in bathing trunks, with a glass of tea whose ice has melted, absorbed in the fictional world he is making. In that story, private detective Andy Drake is trying to prove that John Shackleford is not the serial killer nicknamed Baseball Cap. The return to work does not erase the impulse to escape; it shows how the next page can become one way of continuing despite it.

The closing repetition makes the phrase both the passage’s summary and its method. Its movement from root canals and boat hulls to breath and fiction joins physical survival, routine, and creative labor without treating them as separate forms of persistence. The refrain offers no grand resolution: it makes continuation legible as the next small act.