“The only one,” I said, “unless you also belong to the very small and select party of searchers.”
I fancy that he turned his head a little towards me, but I kept my gaze fixed on the indigo masses of the obscure prospect before us.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked.
“Not so much who as what,” I said. “And even then it isn’t so easy to define. I’ve heard men call it beauty and mystery, and things like that; but just now it seemed to me that what I wanted most was a universal miracle—some really inexplicable happening that would upset every law the physicists have ever stated. I was thinking, for instance, how thrilling it would be if the sun did not rise this morning. One would know, then, that all our scientific guesses at laws were just so many baby speculations founded on nothing more substantial than a few thousand years of experience which had, by some chance given always more or less the same results. Like a long run on the red, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “Well? Go on.”
I was greatly stimulated by his encouragement. Here, at last, was the listener I had been waiting for all through the night.
“One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed rules,” I continued. “And the more you learn the nearer you are to the deadly ability of being able to foretell the future. If we ever do reach that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan’t be there to see it. Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected always happened, and next year’s happenings were always expected! And yet we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the universal kill joy.”
“Hm!” commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful agreement.
“You don’t agree with that?” I asked.
“Well, I see what you’re after, in a way,” he acknowledged; “but it doesn’t seem to me that it amounts to very much—practically.”