come into the room you
might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams
or perhaps indigestion.

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before
the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a
painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to
write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end
he wrote a book which he called "The Book of the
Grotesque." It was never published, but I saw it once
and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The
book had one central thought that is very strange and
has always remained with me. By remembering it I have
been able to understand many people and things that I
was never able to understand before. The thought was
involved but a simple statement of it would be
something like this:

That in the beginning when the world was young there
were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a
truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a
composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in
the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his
book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There
was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion,
the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of
profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and
hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared
snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite
strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The
old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the
matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the
people took one of the truths to himself, called it his
truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a
grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent
all of his life writing and was filled with words,
would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter.
The subject would become so big in his mind that he
himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He
didn't, I suppose, for the same reason that he never
published the book. It was the young thing inside him
that saved the old man.

Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the
writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of
what are ca