nconvenient in its practical operation, mortal
tempers being so infirm and variable as they are. If one of us happened
to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt
on the same side of everybody's head. Thus, even on the supposition
that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great
deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.

Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at
least a temporary novelty. I thought of going across the Rocky
Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a volunteer
on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years, no matter in
what direction, and coming back on the other side of the world. Then,
should the colonists of Blithedale have established their enterprise on
a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim staff and dusty
shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere. Or, in case
Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of Reform, as he
now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by that time, to give
me what I was inclined to think the only trustworthy hold on his
affections. Meanwhile, before deciding on any ultimate plan, I
determined to remove myself to a little distance, and take an exterior
view of what we had all been about.

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was
going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were
wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,
and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and
happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a
decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting
quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the
world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it
was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was
impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything
in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the
crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface
portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we
ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the
atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No
sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,