For even if we have the
sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still
it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be
borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break
out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly,
all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the
resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things,
endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves
have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in
themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds,
to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our
spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate
other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside
ourselves, where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined the
woman I loved as in a setting of whatever places I most longed, at the
time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she who attracted me to
them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world, that was not by the
mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my
dreams of travel and of love were only moments--which I isolate
artificially to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different
heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or
motion--were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of
all the forces of my life.
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