involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the
stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a
theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an
actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself
as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections;
and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote
from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am
conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it
were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but
taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play,
it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It
was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends
sometimes.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love
to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is
always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the
miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really
diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the
field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome,
because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit
down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he
can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself
for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit
alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the
blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house,
is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer
in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the
latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not
having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at
meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old
musty