of youth, jutted her mocking pinnacles toward sky, her clumsy
turrets verticalled on gold! And God, the God of gales and
gravity, loved His children to dare and contradict Him, to rally
Him with equations of their own.

"God, I defy you!" he cried.



CHAPTER EIGHT

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be
carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy
days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.

But Gissing was acutely conscious of Time. Though not subtle
enough to analyze the matter acutely, he had a troublesome
feeling about it. He kept checking off a series of Nows. "Now I
am having my bath," he would say to himself in the morning. "Now
I am dressing. Now I am on the way to the store. Now I am in the
jewellery aisle, being polite to customers. Now I am having
lunch." After a period in which time ran by unnoticed, he would
suddenly realize a fresh Now, and feel uneasy at the knowledge
that it would shortly dissolve into another one. He tried,
vainly, to swim up-stream against the smooth impalpable fatal
current. He tried to dam up Time, to deepen the stream so that
he could bathe in it carelessly. Time, he said, is life; and life
is God; time, then, is little bits of God. Those who waste their
time in vulgarity or folly are the true atheists.