Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/238

226 as the others! There are at any given moment in the world a hundred persons at most who are worth seeing and talking to for more than once. You can talk to almost any one once—to a few twice; to almost no one three times. If it were not for the perpetual arrival of new events, we should draw knives on one another and smite under the fifth rib. But luckily something is always happening. That is what saves us.'

The other was silent.

'Why don't you confute me?' asked Randal.

'Because you are merely restating your disillusioned ind vidualismindividualism [sic]. I remember (that hermit of the drivers oddly enough recalls it to me) once hearing you adopt a phrase, which was also a theory of life, of Henri Beyle's, and giving in your savage adherence to it. La chasse au bonheur—the hunt for happiness, that is the story of each of us from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year. We rise in the morning equipped tant bien que mal with the implements for the capture of the game, and we return in the evening to eat and sleep, having failed or succeeded. The Jagd-lust takes a hundred thousand shapes; the Jagd-ordnung varies perpetually. We cover it all up with innumerable lies and self-deceptions; but there, in one word, is the simple, brutal truth concerning the life of each and every