Edward and God
It was Sunday afternoon and the two lovers left for town; they were alone in a compartment (the girl was already gaily chattering away again), and Edward remembered how some time ago he had looked forward to finding in non-obligatory Alice the seriousness of life, which his duties would never provide for him; and with regret he realized (the train idyllicaly clattered against the joints between the rails) that the love affair he’d experienced with Alice was derisory, made up of chance and errors, without any importance or sense whatsoever; he heard Alice’s words, he saw her gestures (she squeezed his hand), and it occurred to him that these were signs devoid of meaning, currency without funds, weights made of paper, and that he couldn’t grant them significance any more than God could the prayer of the naked directress; and all of a sudden it seemed to him that, in fact, all the people whom he’d met in his new place of work were only ink lines spreading on blotting paper, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm substance; but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next) was that he himself was only a shadow of all these shadowy people; after all, he had been exhausting his own brain only to adjust to them and imitate them and yet, even if he imitated them with an inward laugh, unseriously, even if he made an effort to mock them secretly (and so exonerate his accommodation), it didn’t alter the case, for even malicious imitation remains imitation, and the shadow that mocks remains a shadow, subordinate, derivative, and wretched, and nothing more.
…..
He was too bright to concede that he saw the essential in the unessential, but he was too weak not to long secretly for the essential.
