All seemed still but for the winged insects flashing
through shafts of the sunlight out of the gloom of the trees and
disappearing again like infinitesimal meteors. But our concern is
with the thoughts of man, of which deeds are but the shadows:
wherever these are active it is wrong to say all is still; for
whether they cast their shadows, which are actions, or whether
they remain a force not visibly stirring matter, they are the
source of the tales we write and the lives we lead; it is they
that gave History her material and they that bade her work it up
into books.
And thoughts were very active about that oak-tree. For while the
thoughts of la Garda arose like dawn, and disappeared into mists,
their prisoner was silently living through the sunny days of his
life, which are at no time quite lost to us, and which flash vivid
and bright and near when memory touches them, herself awakened by
the nearness of death. He lived again days far from the day that
had brought him where he stood. He drew from those days (that is
to say) that delight, that essence of hours, that something which
we call life. The sun, the wind, the rough sand, the splash of the
sea, on the star-fish, and all the things that it feels during its
span, are stored in something like its memory, and are what we
call its life: it is the same with all of us. Life is feeling. The
prisoner from the store of his memory was taking all he had.
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