The only real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were my
last, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, held
only one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived. Since then I
have tried to recall, like one who struggles to restore the visions of a
fever, what it was that I ran to attain, or why I should have borne
without rebellion such indignities to soul and body. That life seems
now, of all illusions, the most distant and unreal. It is like the
unguessed eternity before we are born: not of concern compared with that
eternity upon which we are now embarked.

All these things happened in cities and among crowds. I like to forget
them. They smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so much worse
than any mere slavery of the body.

One day--it was in April, I remember, and the soft maples in the city
park were just beginning to blossom--I stopped suddenly. I did not
intend to stop. I confess in humiliation that it was no courage, no will
of my own. I intended to go on toward Success: but Fate stopped me. It
was as if I had been thrown violently from a moving planet: all the
universe streamed around me and past me. It seemed to me that of all
animate creation, I was the only thing that was still or silent. Until I
stopped I had not known the pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy and
understanding, never felt before, for those who left the running. I lay
prostrate with fever and close to death for weeks and watched the world
go by: the dust, the noise, the very colour of haste. The only sharp
pang that I suffered was the feeling that I should be broken-hearted and
that I was not; that I should care and that I did not. It was as though
I had died and escaped all further responsibility. I even watched with
dim equanimity my friends racing past me, panting as they ran. Some of