results of some fortuitous concourse of dead atoms, to rob life, in a word, of all its wonder. These problems of paramount, if insoluble, interest, were taken as a matter of course. There was, indeed, no sense of wonder.
It astonished me, doubtless, because in my own case this was the only kind of knowledge I desired, and desired passionately. To me it was the only real knowledge, the only thing worth knowing.... And I was ever getting little shocks on discovering gradually that not only was such knowledge not wanted, but that to talk of its possibility constituted one a dreamer, if not a bore. How anybody in possession of ordinary faculties could look, say, at the night sky of stars, and not know the wondrous flood of divine curiosity about his own personal relation to the universe drench his being--this never ceased to perplex me. Yet with almost everybody, the few exceptions being usually "odd," conversation rapidly flattened out as though such things were of no importance, while stocks and shares, some kind of practical "market-value," at any rate, quickly became again the topic of real value. Not only, however, did this puzzle me; it emphasized at this time one's sense of being peculiar; it sketched a growing loneliness in more definite outline. No one wanted to make some money more than I did, but these other things--one reason, doubtless, why I never did make money--came indubitably first.
The second big and daily astonishment of those awakening years, which also has persisted, if not actually intensified, concerned the blank irresponsiveness to beauty of almost everybody I had to do with. Exceptions, again, were either cranks or useless, unpractical people, failures to a man. Many liked "scenery," either perceiving it for themselves, or on having it pointed out to them; but very few, as with myself, knew their dominant mood of the day influenced--well, by a gleam of light upon the lake at dawn, a faint sound of music in the pines, a sudden strip of blue on a day of storm, the great piled coloured clouds at evening--"such clouds as flit, like splendour-winged
moths about a taper, round the red west when the sun dies
