But The Pleasure Was More Than I
Could Endure In That Feeble State; The Chilly Wind Pierced Me Like
Needles Of Ice, My Senses Swam, And I Would Have Fallen To The Ground
If My Elder Brother Had Not Caught Me In His Arms And Taken Me Back To
The House.
In spite of that fainting fit I was happy again with the old
happiness, and from day to day
I regained strength, until one day in
early August I was suddenly reminded that it was my anniversary by my
brothers and sisters all coming to me with birthday presents, which
they had been careful to provide beforehand, and congratulations on my
recovery.
Fifteen years old! This was indeed the most memorable day of my life,
for on that evening I began to think about myself, and my thoughts
were strange and unhappy thoughts to me-what I was, what I was in the
world for, what I wanted, what destiny was going to make of me! Or was
it for me to do just what I wished, to shape my own destiny, as my
elder brothers had done? It was the first time such questions had come
to me, and I was startled at them. It was as though I had only just
become conscious; I doubt that I had ever been fully conscious before.
I had lived till now in a paradise of vivid sense-impressions in which
all thoughts came to me saturated with emotion, and in that mental
state reflection is well-nigh impossible. Even the idea of death,
which had come as a surprise, had not made me reflect. Death was a
person, a monstrous being who had sprung upon me in my flowery
paradise and had inflicted a wound with a poisoned dagger in my flesh.
Then had come the knowledge of immortality for the soul, and the wound
was healed, or partly so, for a time at all events; after which the
one thought that seriously troubled me was that I could not always
remain a boy. To pass from boyhood to manhood was not so bad as dying;
nevertheless it was a change painful to contemplate. That everlasting
delight and wonder, rising to rapture, which was in the child and boy
would wither away and vanish, and in its place there would be that
dull low kind of satisfaction which men have in the set task, the
daily and hourly intercourse with others of a like condition, and in
eating and drinking and sleeping. I could not, for example, think of
so advanced an age as fifteen without the keenest apprehension. And
now I was actually at that age-at that parting of the ways, as it
seemed to me.
What, then, did I want?-what did I ask to have? If the question had
been put to me then, and if I had been capable of expressing what was
in me, I should have replied: I want only to keep what I have; to rise
each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from
day to day, from year to year.
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