Yet it seems
useless to say that life is real and imagination unreal. They are
both there, both real. The danger is to use life to feed the
imagination, not to use imagination to feed life. In these sad
weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world of
imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into
pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy
dwelling, and I must arise and go. I have sported with life as
though it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like
a wild beast, gaunt, hungry, angry. I am terrified by its evil
motions, I sicken at its odour. That is the deep mystery and horror
of life, that one yields unerringly to blind and imperious
instincts, not knowing which may lead us into green and fertile
pastures of hope and happy labour, and which may draw us into
thorny wildernesses. The old fables are true, that one must not
trust the smiling presences, the beguiling words. Yet how is one to
know which of the forms that beckon us we may trust. Must we learn
the lesson by sad betrayals, by dark catastrophes? I have wandered,
it seems, along a flowery path--and yet I have not gathered the
poisonous herbs of sin; I have loved innocence and goodness; but
for all that I have followed a phantom, and now that it is too late
to retrace my steps, I find that I have been betrayed.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102