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You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.”
It would be easier if your philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow and individualistic.
glory—the happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye Up in the broad fields of the sky.
Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.
It was only many days later that Ransom discovered how to deal with these sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man.
Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.
“But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.”
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till
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“And indeed,” he continued, “the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem.”
And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?”
I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
There I drank life because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks save one.”
His feeling was less than fear; it had in it something of embarrassment, something of shyness, something of submission, and it was profoundly uneasy.
“Life is greater than any system of morality;
a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken
