communicating door behind her. At last he had found means to stop her chattering plans. Instead of making contracts with her, whose true meaning she tailed to understand, he must show her who was master. He sacrificed something: the clear vista of those dim, book-filled rooms, die inviolate emptiness of his study. But he had in exchange something he valued more; the possibility of continuing his work, for which the first and most important condition was quiet. He panted for silence as others do for air.
All the same the first necessity was to accustom himself to the oppressive change in his surroundings. For some weeks he was irritated by the narrowness of his new quarters. Confined to a fourth part of his original living space, he began to understand the wretchedness of prisoners, whom he had earlier been inclined — for what exceptional opportunities for learning they have, men learn nothing in freedom —to regard as fortunate. It was all over now with his pacing up and down when a significant idea visited him. In days of old, when every door stood open, a healing wind coursed through the library. Through the lofty skylights poured illumination and inspiration. In moments of excitement he had only to rise and stride fifty yards in one direction, fifty yards back again. The unbroken view of the sky was as uplifting as the invigorating distance. Through the glass above him he could see the condition of the heavens, more tranquil, more attenuated than the reality. A soft blue: the sun shines, but not on me. A grey no less soft: it will rain, but not on me. A gentle murmur announced the falling drops. He was aware of them at a distance, they did not touch him. He knew only: the sun shines, the clouds gather, the rain falls. It was as if he had barricaded himself against the world: against all material relations, against all terrestrial needs, had builded himself an hermitage, a vast hermitage, so vast that it would hold those few things on this earth which are more than this earth itself, more than the dust to which our life at last returns; as if he had closely sealed it and filled it with those things alone. His journey through the unknown was like no journey. Enough for him to watch from the windows of his observation car the continued validity of certain natural laws; the change from night to day, the capricious incessant working of the climate, the flow of time — and the journey was as nothing.
But now the hermitage had dwindled. When Kien looked up from the writing desk, which was placed across one corner of the room, his view was cut off by a meaningless door. Three quarters of his library lay behind it; he could sense his books, he would have sensed them through a hundred doors; but to sense where once he had seen was bitterness indeed. Many times he reproached himself for thus of his own free will mutilating a living organism, his own creation. Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel -pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived? Every thinking being knows those moments in which the traditional frontier set by science between the organic and the inorganic, seems artificial and outdated, like every frontier drawn by men. Is not a secret antagonism to this division revealed in the very phrase 'dead matter' ? For the dead must once have been the living. Let us admit then of a substance that it is dead , have we not in so doing endowed it with an erstwhile life . Strangest of all did it appear to Kien that men thought less highly of books than of animals. To these, the mightiest of all, these which determine our goals and therefore our very being, is commonly attributed a smaller share of life than to mere animals, our impotent victims. He doubted, but he submitted to the current opinion,
All the same the first necessity was to accustom himself to the oppressive change in his surroundings. For some weeks he was irritated by the narrowness of his new quarters. Confined to a fourth part of his original living space, he began to understand the wretchedness of prisoners, whom he had earlier been inclined — for what exceptional opportunities for learning they have, men learn nothing in freedom —to regard as fortunate. It was all over now with his pacing up and down when a significant idea visited him. In days of old, when every door stood open, a healing wind coursed through the library. Through the lofty skylights poured illumination and inspiration. In moments of excitement he had only to rise and stride fifty yards in one direction, fifty yards back again. The unbroken view of the sky was as uplifting as the invigorating distance. Through the glass above him he could see the condition of the heavens, more tranquil, more attenuated than the reality. A soft blue: the sun shines, but not on me. A grey no less soft: it will rain, but not on me. A gentle murmur announced the falling drops. He was aware of them at a distance, they did not touch him. He knew only: the sun shines, the clouds gather, the rain falls. It was as if he had barricaded himself against the world: against all material relations, against all terrestrial needs, had builded himself an hermitage, a vast hermitage, so vast that it would hold those few things on this earth which are more than this earth itself, more than the dust to which our life at last returns; as if he had closely sealed it and filled it with those things alone. His journey through the unknown was like no journey. Enough for him to watch from the windows of his observation car the continued validity of certain natural laws; the change from night to day, the capricious incessant working of the climate, the flow of time — and the journey was as nothing.
But now the hermitage had dwindled. When Kien looked up from the writing desk, which was placed across one corner of the room, his view was cut off by a meaningless door. Three quarters of his library lay behind it; he could sense his books, he would have sensed them through a hundred doors; but to sense where once he had seen was bitterness indeed. Many times he reproached himself for thus of his own free will mutilating a living organism, his own creation. Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel -pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived? Every thinking being knows those moments in which the traditional frontier set by science between the organic and the inorganic, seems artificial and outdated, like every frontier drawn by men. Is not a secret antagonism to this division revealed in the very phrase 'dead matter' ? For the dead must once have been the living. Let us admit then of a substance that it is dead , have we not in so doing endowed it with an erstwhile life . Strangest of all did it appear to Kien that men thought less highly of books than of animals. To these, the mightiest of all, these which determine our goals and therefore our very being, is commonly attributed a smaller share of life than to mere animals, our impotent victims. He doubted, but he submitted to the current opinion,
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