Page 185 - erewhon

whole picture, and the incidents vary little—rivers, woods,
plains, mountains, towns and peoples, love, sorrow, and
death: yet the interest never flags, and we look hopefully for
some good fortune, or fearfully lest our own faces be shown
us as figuring in something terrible. When the scene is past
we think we know it, though there is so much to see, and so
little time to see it, that our conceit of knowledge as regards
the past is for the most part poorly founded; neither do we
care about it greatly, save in so far as it may affect the future,
wherein our interest mainly lies.
The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth
and stars and all the heavenly worlds began to roll from
east to west, and not from west to east, and in like manner
they say it is by chance that man is drawn through life with
his face to the past instead of to the future. For the future is
there as much as the past, only that we may not see it. Is it
not in the loins of the past, and must not the past alter be-
fore the future can do so?
Sometimes, again, they say that there was a race of men
tried upon the earth once, who knew the future better than
the past, but that they died in a twelvemonth from the mis-
ery which their knowledge caused them; and if any were
to be born too prescient now, he would be culled out by
natural selection, before he had time to transmit so peace-
destroying a faculty to his descendants.
Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which
he must perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it
he is no better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miser-
able than the devils.

1 Erewhon