ce. It too is gray, monotonous, spectral, producing
neither lights nor shadows.

Someone in Gray moves noiselessly away from the wall, close against
which He has been standing. He wears a broad, gray, formless smock,
vaguely outlining the contours of His body; and a hat of the same
gray throws the upper part of His face into heavy shadow. His eyes
are invisible. All that is seen are His cheekbones, His nose, and His
chin, which is massive, heavy, and blunt, as if hewn out of rock. His
lips are pressed tight together. Raising His head slightly, He begins
to speak in a firm, cold, unemotional, unimpassioned voice, like
a reader hired by the hour reading the Book of Fate with brutal
indifference._

SOMEONE IN GRAY

Look and listen, you who have come here to laugh and be amused. There
will pass before you the whole life of Man, from his dark beginning to
his dark ending. Previously non-existant, mysteriously hidden in the
infiniteness of time, neither feeling nor thinking and known to no
one, he will mysteriously break through the prison of non-being and
with a cry announce the beginning of his brief life. In the night of
non-existence a light will go up, kindled by an unseen hand. It is the
life of Man. Behold the flame--it is the life of Man.

Being born, he will take the form and the name of Man, and in all
things will become like other men already living. And their hard lot
will be his lot, and his hard lot will be the lot of all human beings.
Inexorably impelled by time, he will, with inavertible necessity, pass
through all the stages of human life, from the bottom to the top, from
the top to the bottom. Limited in vision, he will never see the next
step which his unsteady foot, poised in the air, is in the very act of
taking. Limited in knowledge, he will never know what the coming day
will bring, or the coming hour, or the coming minute. In his unseeing
blindness, troubled by premonitions, agitated by hope and fear, he
will submissively complete the iron-traced circle foreordained.

Behold him a happy youth. See how brightly the candle burns. From
boundless stretches of space the icy wind blows, circling, careering,
and tossing the flame. In vain. Bright and clear the candle burns. Yet
the wax is dwindling, consumed by the fire. Yet the wax is dwindling.

Behold him a happy husband and father. But see how strangely dim and
faint the candle burns, as if the yellowing flame were wrinkling, as
if it were shiverin