the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form
of man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be the
nobler and the more perdurable relation.




THE ILLUSION OF HISTORIC TIME


He who has survived his childhood intelligently must become conscious of
something more than a change in his sense of the present and in his
apprehension of the future. He must be aware of no less a thing than the
destruction of the past. Its events and empires stand where they did,
and the mere relation of time is as it was. But that which has fallen
together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is
the past itself--time--the fact of antiquity.

He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no
more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit of
measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of
paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. He had
thought them to be wide.

For a man has nothing whereby to order and place the floods, the states,
the conquests, and the temples of the past, except only the measure which
he holds. Call that measure a space of ten years. His first ten years
had given him the illusion of a most august scale and measure. It was
then that he conceived Antiquity. But now! Is it to a decade of ten
such little years as these now in his hand--ten of his mature years--that