And then
people are always trying to spoil it for you. From the time you are
a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about
dead folks. In the catechism, in the history books, they are
always shouting: '_Mourir pour la Patrie!_' It is either popery or
patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present
day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to
take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are
all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces
of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it
doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone;
we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no
one knows why;--but then we don't know either why we live at all; it
is not life, we are just there.
"They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers
took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who
run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in
heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not
so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but
the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard
to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the
way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full
of toads.
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