And then starts the one glorious activity of man: the getting himself into a new relationship with a new heaven and a new earth. Oh, if we knew, the earth is everything and the sun is everything that we have missed knowing. But if we persist in our attitude of parasites on the body of earth and sun, the earth and the sun will be mere victims on which we feed our louse-like complacency for a long time yet: we, a myriad myriad little egos, five billion feeding like one.
The thing in itself! Why I never yet met a man who was anything but what he had been told to be. Let a man be a man-in-himself, and then he can begin to talk about the Ding an Sich. Men may be utterly different from the things they now seem. And then they will behold, to their astonishment, that the sun is absolutely different from the thing they now see, and that they call “sun”.
THE NOVEL
OMEBODY says the novel is doomed. Somebody else says it is the green bay tree getting greener. Everybody says something, so why shouldn’t I!
Mr. Santayana sees the modern novel expiring because it is getting so thin; which means, Mr. Santayana is bored.
I am rather bored myself. It becomes harder and harder to read the whole of any modern novel. One reads a bit, and knows the rest; or else one doesn’t want to know any more.
This is sad. But again, I don’t think it’s the novel’s fault. Rather the novelists’.