Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/237

Rh You are merely exercising your privilege of blame, and don't want to be taken seriously. You said the other day that you liked the piquancy of the contrast between the ante- and post-prandial humours, just as you did the alternations of the languor and ferocity of the tropics; but perseverance and the search for the middle humour are the gifts of the temperate zones of the West and the North. Why do you want to disintegrate us? There is no firmer foundation for anything like happiness than the comprehension of one's fellows. When you cannot understand the look in their eyes, you feel like a mournful pilgrim in an alien country. A glance, a smile, that makes a man articulate to you and you to him, strikes a note of pleasure in you, and makes the world the habitat of intelligence.'

'In theory. In practice I find the banality of the smiles and glances only disgusts and wearies me. There is nothing new. The essential want of variety in things is ghastly. Why, when I skim through a photograph album full of unknown people, do I feel I have met them all and been bored by them all? Here and there, once in a hundred pages, a sweet face suddenly strikes me, or a strong face. For a few moments it interests me. I even think of it afterwards. Two days later I return to it. Surely I dreamed! It is just as commonplace, as common