ey
may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the
only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those
which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil
gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of
horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization
is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in
a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till
you arrive there yourself! To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of
geologic times is hard for our imagination--they seem too much like
mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those
museum-skulls that did not daily through long years of the foretime
hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living
victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims, if on a
smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our
very {161} hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the
panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles
and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real
as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day
that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts
clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated
melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.[85]

[85] Example: "It was about eleven o'clock at night ... but I strolled
on still with the people.... Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a
crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an
instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the
party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an
eye. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones
in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, 'Ho hai!' involuntarily
reechoed by all of us, was over in three seconds; and then I know not
what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and
companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by
our enemy the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of
describing the terror of that dreadful moment. Our limbs stiffened,
our power of speech ceased, and our hearts beat violently, and only a
whisper of the same 'Ho hai!' was heard fro