So be it! If the present refuses to yield its manna, we will draw upon our last resources. If the times overwhelm us with bitterness, we will flee to our refuges, where we have nothing to fear from intruders or masters or tormentors. Common-sense folk, who have the secret of debasing life in the name of a reason that is more mischievous than actual stupidity, are in the habit of devoting an almost superstitious worship to the present reality. To tell the truth, they are greatly afraid that the taste for memory and hope will turn young men away from that immediate action which is necessary for the conquest and preservation of material wealth. They honor with great pomp the origins in the past of those traditions that are favorable to them; and the way they invoke and prepare for the future loads the present with chains and shackles. They dread, in reverie, an enemy of action. As if there were any great actions that have not their source in great dreams! These people deceive themselves. They sacrifice an unequalled consolation to the needs of a fleeting fortune. But do not imagine that the failure of their fortune leaves these men utterly abandoned: the refuges open gladly, even for those who have despised them. III An intimate friend once said to me, as he watched his little son playing: “You see; he’s no longer the baby you knew last year. He’s another child. I have been cheated of the one I had last year. I shall never have him again. I have lost a child.” O dear, big heart, how beautiful and how unjust those words are! How human! How they overflow with ingratitude and with adoration! You know quite well that every object that appears on the horizon of our souls has, for us, two existences. One is sudden, sharp, almost always penetrated with an intense and, so to say, corrosive flavor: that is the existence of the present. Men agree in recognizing that its duration is hardly measurable. But the other existence is perennial, as ample as the measure of our life and our thoughts; in this sense it is almost infinite. Thus each moment of the present survives in memory for years, and doubtless for centuries, since posterity can gather up and prolong the best of our acts and our works. It is true, my friend, that each moment dispossesses us, even of the object we never withdraw our arms from. The miser, infatuated with his material riches, may well suffer agony of mind over them, but we, we? Do we not know that each moment restores to us, transfigured, all the treasures it has snatched away from us? It robs us of the frailer blessings, it offers us imperishable blessings, less mortal than ourselves.