And then the loneliness of us!
Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the
inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which
there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for
ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.
At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and
that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain
we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and
most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew
nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even
tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which
drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace
of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep
at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!
"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young
men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one
smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!
Such was my case.
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