“And, do you know, the capacity of thus abstracting one’s thought itself from its outward form, of looking upon the universe and one’s very thought from such a standpoint, sets one on heights incomprehensibly sublime, and gives the purest, the most unearthly delight.”
... There is a black cat here, with eyes like emeralds; it ranges noiselessly amongst the rows of gravestones. A singularly sociable creature; it follows us everywhere in our walks, like a dog.... When I look at it, I cannot help believing in Metempsychosis: there must dwell within this cat some very refined aristocratic soul, one that looks upon everything with supreme scepticism.
“What is the matter, Martha?”
“Nothing. I have only dropped a hairpin.”
A tortoise-shell pin has fallen out of her thick black tresses, and dropped on to the earth with a faint sound.
Martha is just now in a very lofty mood. This real world of ours strikes her as a contrast, ridiculous in its littleness, to the world we are speaking of. So she does not wish me to pick up that pin, though it has dropped quite close to me on the heather. To my mind this is too high-flown, too girlish. After all, the realities of life are paramount, and we ought to have so much intellectual culture as never to forget it.
Wherefore I give her the pin, smiling very sarcastically.
“After all,” I conclude, rising from the hollow ridge and preparing to walk home, “I quite understand that what I have said amounts to the same as belief in nothing. It is all the same to me whether I shall cease to be after death, or be transferred to a world wherein there is no idea of being, or of any Ego, conditioning my self-consciousness. I understand, too, that a world in which Being does not contradict Non-Being, is to our minds equivalent to no world at all. So that my faith is similar to your unfaith, but inferred and formulated otherwise.”
Janusz is very humble and wretched now. Sometimes, when we sit long together of an evening, he will fall asleep with his head in my lap, worn out with nervous exhaustion. And then I am face to face with something very strange.
I feel a mysterious dread of the torment of an everlasting vigil, together with a sense of responsibility beyond my strength. Yet I do not wake him, although I am shuddering with dread; I will not let him know that I am afraid!... There are certain things one should not speak about to children.... That I love solitude when alone, but that the feeling of solitude when some one is by me, fills me with unspeakable dread, for then I hear my soul uttering her triumphant laugh: this I would never confess to him.