EXCERPT The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. He who worries away at the impenetrable connections of alienated elements lays himself open to intimations which no individual mind can bear—knowledge too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep, those tormented hours drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. In the ticking of the cheap mantel-clock, whose sound has come to seem like a thunder of artillery, I hear the mockery of light-years for the span of my existence. The hours that are past as seconds before the inner sense has registered them, and sweep it away in their cataract, proclaim that like all memory, our inner experience is doomed to oblivion in cosmic night…