“‘You misinterpret my needs, O friend of the town,’ I said.  ’I do not look to the stars to find a woman.  My yearnings are not towards a woman of this earth.  Well do I know that you have offered me the most deadly delusion in this woman, perfectly wrought for my being.  You have taken hold of all my inexpressible yearning and have written over it the word woman.  And when one of us irreconcilables marries, it often happens that he forgets his loneliness and loses the sense of his mystery.  His wife becomes a little house which he lives inside, and his soul is covered up and lost by her.  Where he used to see the eternal stars, he sees a woman, and as he understands her, he thinks he understands himself.”

“‘But consider,’ proceeded my tempter, ’the woman who is exactly the complement of yourself, a woman marvellously and uniquely fashioned to round you off and supply your deficiencies, and use your superfluities.’

“‘If such there be,’ I replied, ’I shall not seek her in the town.  I know what you mean.  I ought to make a home and rear up the second generation.  I ought to renounce my own future and dedicate myself to a child so that the mistakes in the old may be set right in the new.  I must try to put a child on the road that I missed when I myself was a child, put it in the old coach, perhaps, with a passport in its hand.  Even so, that solves no problem, rather multiplies my own problem.  What is deathless in man is not answered in that way.  What does it profit man that mankind goes on?  We cannot tell.  But it is clear that we learn nothing new thereby.  Rather, as it seems, we forget what we have learned.’

“My friend smiled and said, ‘You will think differently later.’  Meanwhile he brought me into the heart of his town, a great city of idolaters and opium-eaters.  And he took me to the gaming tables of pleasure and the gaming tables of work, and he sought to enchant me with figures and hypnotise me with the gleam of gold.  He showed me how fortunes were made in roulette and in commerce, and tried to bring upon me the gambler’s madness.  And I smiled and said: 

“’Behold the eyes of yonder gambler; his soul is asphyxied with gold.  He pays that homage to the base gleam of a metal that I do to the light of the stars.  He is an idolater.’

“In the centre of the city a terrible fear troubled my soul, for it realised that it alone in all this great city of souls preserved its conscience and its wakefulness.  By the glare of men’s eyes it understood how all were somnambulists.  We walked among millions who walked in their sleep.  And in their sleep they committed terrible crimes.  They looked at me with eyes that saw not; at the bidding of strange dreams they went forward secretly.

“I beheld the thousand mockeries, and chief among them the mockery of our eternal mystery.  Instead of the church that is the dome of heaven itself they had built churches of stone.  And the people, urged by their dreams, congregated themselves in these churches and were ministered unto by false priests.  And dreams of truth conflicted with nightmare enacted themselves.  The churches fell out among themselves, and the people fought one another.  False priests stood by irresolute, their soft, shapeless lips having been smoothed away by maxims and old words.  And they stood in front of idols in a semblance of defence.