For what he was asked now to reckon with was that he’d been called forth twice out of the ashes, out of the dust and rubble. For what? You must not suppose such elections to be happy ones for they are not. In his sparing he found himself severed from both antecedents and posterity alike. He was but some brevity of a being. His claims to the common life of men became tenuous, insubstantial. He was a trunk without root or branch.
