The clock in the steeple strikes five, as though to ring
down the curtain and mark in the infinite history of events which
none will recollect the conclusion of a spectacle which never
again, until the end of the world and of the universe of worlds,
will be just what it was during those seconds when it beguiled my
wandering eyes.
For in vain will they repeat the procession next year and every
year after: never again will it be the same. Not only will
several of the actors probably have disappeared, but all those
who resume their old places in the ranks will have undergone the
thousand little visible and invisible changes wrought by the
passing days and weeks. In a word, this insignificant moment is
unique, irrecoverable, inimitable, as are all the moments in the
existence of all things; and this little picture, enduring for a
few seconds suspended in boundless duration, has lapsed into
eternity, where henceforth it will remain in its entirety to the
end of time, so much so that, if a man could one day recapture in
the past, among what some one has called the "astral negatives,"
the image of what it was, he would find it intact, unchanged,
ineffaceable and undeniable.
26
It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back
and see again the astral negative of an event that is no more; and
retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an
impossible thing.
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