It smiles when we are frightened and sometimes it is
frightened when we smile. And it is always the winner,
humiliating our reason, crushing our wisdom and silencing
arguments and passions alike with the contemptuous hand of
destiny. The greatest doctors surround our sick-bed and deceive
themselves and us in foretelling our death or our recovery: it
alone whispers in our car the truth that will not be denied. A
thousand apparently mortal blows fall upon our head and not a
lash of its eyelids quivers; but suddenly a tiny shock, which our
senses had not even transmitted to our brain, wakes it with a
start. It sits up, looks around and understands. It has seen the
crack in the vault that separates the two lives. It gives the
signal for departure. Forthwith panic spreads from cell to cell;
and the innumerous city that we are utters yells of horror and
distress and hustles around the gates of death.
9
That great figure, that new being has been there, in our
darkness, from all time, though its awkward and extravagant
actions, until recently attributed to the gods, the demons or the
dead, am only now asking for our serious attention. It has been
likened to an immense block of which our personality is but a
diminutive facet; to an iceberg of which we see a few glistening
prisms that represent our life, while nine-tenths of the enormous
mass remain buried in the shadows of the sea.
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