cca; I think it is the very
centre of the sacred place, and I recall the tiniest details of it. I
can picture to myself the scarcely visible mosses that grow there, and
the gaps made by time, which the spiders now inhabit. Growing up at the
back of the wall there is an arbor of ivy and honeysuckles whose shade
I sought daily every beautiful summer day for the purpose of studying my
lessons. But I lounged there lazily, as a school-boy will, and allowed
all my attention to be absorbed by those gray stones with their teeming
world of insects. Not only do I love and venerate that old wall as the
Moslems love their holiest mosque, but I regard it also as something
which actually protects me; as something which conserves my life and
prolongs my youth. I would not suffer any one to change it in the least,
and should it be demolished I would feel as if the very supports under
my life were insecure. May it not be because certain things persist,
and are known to us throughout our lives, that we borrow from thence
delusions in regard to our own stability and our own continuance. Seeing
that they abide we suppose that we cannot change nor cease to be.

Personally I cannot explain these sentiments of mine in any other way
than to regard them as some sort of fetich worship.

And when I consider that those stones are very like other stones, that
they have been brought from I know not where, by whom I care not, to be
built into a wall by workmen who lived and died a century before I was
even thought of, I realize the childishness of the illusion, which I
indulge in spite of myself, that it can extend any sort of spiritual
protection to me; I comprehend only too well what a frail and unstable
base has that that symbolizes for me the permanency of life.

Those who have never had a permanent home, but who have from infancy
been taken from place to place, living in lodgings meantime, may not be
able to appreciate these sentiments.

But among those who have daily gathered about the same hearthstone,
there are, I am sure, many who, without confessing it, are susceptible
in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people
often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since
childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of
their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their
lives, seek a warrant for their own hope of immortality?

And doubtless, alas! before their birth