feeling of the old time came steady, full-bodied,
wholesome processes. Touch was different, sight was different, sound
and all the senses were subtler; had it not been that our thought
was steadier and fuller, I believe great multitudes of men would
have gone mad. But, as it was, we understood. The dominant impression
I would convey in this account of the Change is one of enormous
release, of a vast substantial exaltation. There was an effect, as
it were, of light-headedness that was also clear-headedness, and
the alteration in one's bodily sensations, instead of producing the
mental obfuscation, the loss of identity that was a common mental
trouble under former conditions, gave simply a new detachment from
the tumid passions and entanglements of the personal life.

In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been
telling you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the
intensity, the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world.
It was quite clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all
that was, in some mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the
common experience. Men stood up; they took the new air into their
lungs--a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they could
forgive, they could disregard, they could attempt. . . . And it
was no new thing, no miracle that sets aside the former order of
the world. It was a change in material conditions, a change in the
atmosphere, that at one bound had released them. Some of them it
had released to death. . . . Indeed, man himself had changed not
at all. We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing
moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful
things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind
could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be;
but the poison in the air, its poverty in all the nobler elements
which made such moments rare and remarkable--all that has changed.
The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and
slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and stood with
wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.

Section 4

The miracle of the awakening came to me in solitude, the laughter,
and then the tears. Only after some time did I come upon another
man. Until I heard his voice calling I did not seem to feel there
were any other people in the world. All that seemed past, with
all the stresses that were p