ions, or orgies with engines, they
will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It
would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be
agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious
matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of
course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the
risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next
few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.

* * * * *

Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a
regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I
do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must
say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I
would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very
small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are
more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering
generality.

I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at
least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking
down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever
it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for
me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very
large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,
every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very
conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I
like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not
the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always
at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a
world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds
I cannot see."

The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on
is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I
really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small
or large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken
iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of
them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the
work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be
done by men, there would not be standing