Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/156

 VII

Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably

He seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder everywhere. It was as if he had awakened from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really was, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.

How poignantly strange it was that life could afford him nothing save consciousness of the moment immediately at hand! Memory and anticipation, whatever else they might do—and they had important uses, of course, in rousing emotion—yet did not deal directly with reality. What you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more real now than the deeds of Cæsar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the half-hour was as non-existent as the senility of your unborn great-grandchildren. Never was man brought into contact