The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous
activity: the gray autumn for meditative feeling. The one is expansive
and overflowing; the other still and withdrawn. Yesterday our thoughts
were with the dead. To-day we are celebrating the vintage.
November 16, 1864.--Heard of the death of--. Will and intelligence
lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped everything.
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is
out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the
world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider
thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance,
nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and
forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would
seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a
fleeting hallucination. Appeared--disappeared--there is the whole
history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.
Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we
decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively
what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once
although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn
before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the
sphere.
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