He was not ready for it.
It was like being buried alive. In his youth
he would not have believed such a thing possible.
The one thing he had really wanted all his life
was to be free; and there was still something
unconquered in him, something besides the
strong work-horse that his profession had made of him.
He felt rich to-night in the possession of that
unstultified survival; in the light of his
experience, it was more precious than honors
or achievement. In all those busy, successful
years there had been nothing so good as this
hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling
was the only happiness that was real to him,
and such hours were the only ones in which
he could feel his own continuous identity--
feel the boy he had been in the rough days of
the old West, feel the youth who had worked
his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and
gone to study in Paris without a dollar in his
pocket. The man who sat in his offices in
Boston was only a powerful machine. Under
the activities of that machine the person who,
in such moments as this, he felt to be himself,
was fading and dying. He remembered how,
when he was a little boy and his father
called him in the morning, he used to leap
from his bed into the full consciousness of
himself. That consciousness was Life itself.
Whatever took its place, action, reflection,
the power of concentrated thought, were only
functions of a mechanism useful to society;
things that could be bought in the market.
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