A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



I turned my back on the world. Not to rail 

 against it, for it must be acknowledged that I was 

 very fond of it, but to get out of myself. I was 

 neither a Timon nor a Thoreau. Just the ordi 

 nary headlong egoist who is living at the top of 

 his speed. I exiled myself to forget myself, and 

 I found something. Do you know what it was ? 

 It was myself. 



One day as I was coming out of the Stock Ex 

 change when that maelstrom was in full race and 

 when I was in a sort of concentrated paroxysm of 

 suspense, I got a warning. It was like a stroke 

 of lightning. Without premonition or explana 

 tion, it seemed as if the mental tension snapped 

 suddenly. I was hurrying to my office when I 

 was swiftly and softly struck with sudden death. 

 I put it that way because I know of no other 

 phrase that will answer exactly to my sensation 

 at the moment. My relation to the rest of the 

 world broke off, and a frightened consciousness 

 seemed to be crying out what s that ? I recall 

 my interpretation of the sensation, and it was that 

 an iron door had fallen with a clang and cut me off 

 forever. I had run up unthinkingly against Eter 

 nity there on the curb in front of the Exchange. 



It is at such moments that we measure time not 

 by its successions but by its packed simultane- 

 ousness. 



I was not physiologically expert enough to 

 know what had happened, but I readily fitted a 

 current phrase to it. Heart failure, I said. And 

 that accommodating explanation conveys no idea 



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