I am forever new-born;
I am a mind which has never taken to itself a body, a country, an
avocation, a sex, a species. Am I even quite sure of being a man, a
European, an inhabitant of this earth? It seems to me so easy to be
something else, that to be what I am appears to me a mere piece of
arbitrary choice. I cannot possibly take an accidental structure of
which the value is purely relative, seriously. When once a man has
touched the absolute, all that might be other than what it is seems to
him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their private ends excite his
mirth. He looks down from the moon upon his hovel; he beholds the earth
from the heights of the sun; he considers his life from the point of
view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he sees the finite from
the distance of the infinite, and thenceforward the insignificance of
all those things which men hold to be important makes effort ridiculous,
passion burlesque, and prejudice absurd.
August 7, 1874. (_Clarens_).--A day perfectly beautiful, luminous,
limpid, brilliant.
I passed the morning in the churchyard; the "Oasis" was delightful.
Innumerable sensations, sweet and serious, peaceful and solemn, passed
over me.... Around me Russians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping
their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly.
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