ding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse. Then I knew that
the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse was like a living
thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly as they seemed to me;
many details I may have missed or mis-stated; many details may have,
so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road. I remember that I
once called one of my experiences narrated in this paper "A Fragment of
Fact." This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact. No fact could possibly
be more fragmentary than the sort of fact that I expected to be at the
bottom of that street.

.....

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that
the converted do not understand their own religion. Thus I have always
urged in this paper that democracy has a deeper meaning than democrats
understand; that is, that common and popular things, proverbs, and
ordinary sayings always have something in them unrealised by most who
repeat them. Here is one. We have all heard about the man who is in
momentary danger, and who sees the whole of his life pass before him
in a moment. In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is
obviously a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident or
a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets he had ever
taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever passed the brown
bread and butter.

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards the traffic
of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth behind this phrase,
as there is behind all popular phrases. I did really have, in that short
and shrieking period, a rapid succession of a number of fundamental
points of view. I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as
many seconds. My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere
men is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a
state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever
been found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be what
some German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) when they talk
about Pessimism. It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that
happens--as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously
enough, came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. It was
a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that life was much
too important ever to be anything b