It is like the sharp cock-crow which breaks the
spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to flight. These select
gatherings produce, without knowing it, a sort of concert for eyes and
ears, an improvised work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of
everybody concerned, intellect and taste hold festival, and the
associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of
imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; the cultivated
classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past and the buried
world of Astrea. Paradox or no, I believe that these fugitive attempts
to reconstruct a dream whose only end is beauty represent confused
reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or rather
aspirations toward a harmony of things which every day reality denies to
us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse.
April 28, 1871.--For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be
readily and directly conscious of the complications of one's own
organism and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the
sutures of my being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once a
clear perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own
brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual
astonishment and curiosity.
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