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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