. What I see, hear, smell, touch is nothing. I can no
longer summon my senses as witnesses.

"And is that unusual? I must sink to moralizings in order to understand
myself. What is reality but the habit of illusion. Man sees the
unexpected once and identifies it as hallucination. He sees it twice and
calls it phenomenon. But if he acquired the habit of seeing the
unexpected, he accepts it as reality.

"In the same manner in which he builds phantoms into furniture, converts
his Gods into sciences, his myths into laws; in that way he also reduces
his furniture into phantoms. He converts his emotions into music, his
nervous disorders into literature, his three elemental desires into
thought. He is continually holding a mirror to nature and worshipping
the childish phantoms within the mirror.

"This is the basis of egoism--the mania to change realities into
unreality. Because man is the tool of reality. Of unreality he is the
God. It is this desire to dominate which inspires him to avoid truths
over which he has no sway and to invent myths. Gods and virtues over
which he may set himself up as creator and policeman. It is this which
causes him to cloud the simplicities of nature in a maze of
interpretations. It is by his interpretations that he achieves the
illusion of importance. Ignored by the planets, he invents the myth of
mathematics and reduces the universe to a succession of fractions and
Greek letters on a blackboard.

"This, of course, for man the egoist. The more humorous spectacle is the
one in which man finds himself awed by his own lies. His Gods, his
myths, his phantoms come home to roost. He stands blinking in a
veritable storm of lies. His yesterday's lies, his today's lies, his
tomorrow's lies--all his obsolete interpretations, his canonized
interpretations; all his systems, his philosophies; all his Gods and
Phantoms--these riot and war around him. Error endlessly assassinates
itself in a futile effort to escape its immortality.

"And in the midst of this horrendous confusion, stands man--naive and
powerless. But he has his sanity. He blows it up carefully like a soap
bubble and strikes a defiant posture in its center. And against the
walls of his bubble, his phantoms storm in vain. Within his bubble he
proceeds calmly to assert himself."

It was snowing. The night, white with snow, stared like a blind man. A
phantom world hung in the air. Houses and street withdrew silently. The
snow covered them. M