t
it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the
universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the
sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe
before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt
that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.

I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it
and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my
friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other
uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw
it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I
discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum
for all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was
going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not
get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun
peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered
me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I
found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what
it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to
be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably
be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.

I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelee last summer. I
resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.

The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a
comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only
afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It
could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was
underneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The
feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could
not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken
body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been
asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted
to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground
underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living
every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being
asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and
found institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and
ruined part of a ball that ha