"He who would without malice pass his days
Must live obscure and never merit praise."
* * * * *
Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic
had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone
at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is
nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very
structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.
When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they
began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said
that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....
Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life
that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education,
not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to
dead and commonplace formulae.
On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted
by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and
creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up
and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....
* * * * *
And my mind went back to those happy days at Eos ... happy despite the
fly in the ointment....