Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to those men of
duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and humility the measure of
individual worth.
July, 1864.--Among the Alps I become a child again, with all the follies
and _naivete_ of childhood. Shaking off the weight of years, the
trappings of office, and all the tiresome and ridiculous caution with
which one lives, I plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse
myself sans facon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted mood, my
ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me so completely that I feel
myself no longer either townsman, or professor, or savant, or bachelor,
and I remember no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a
bath in Lethe.
It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would destroy my
memory, and wipe out all my previous existence, when I see with what
ease I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into the
condition of a blank sheet, a _tabula rasa_. Life wears such a
dream-aspect to me that I can throw myself without any difficulty into
the situation of the dying, before whose eyes all this tumult of images
and forms fades into nothingness. I have the inconsistency of a fluid, a
vapor, a cloud, and all is easily unmade or transformed in me;
everything passes and is effaced like the waves which follow each other
on the sea.
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