In the Days of the Comet

Everywhere the awakening came with the sunrise.  We awakened to the gladness of the morning; we walked dazzled in a light that was joy.  Everywhere that was so.  It was always morning.  It was morning because, until the direct rays of the sun touched it, the changing nitrogen of our atmosphere did not pass into its permanent phase, and the sleepers lay as they had fallen.  In its intermediate state the air hung inert, incapable of producing either revival or stupefaction, no longer green, but not yet changed to the gas that now lives in us. . . .

To every one, I think, came some parallel to the mental states I have already sought to describe—­a wonder, an impression of joyful novelty.  There was also very commonly a certain confusion of the intelligence, a difficulty in self-recognition.  I remember clearly as I sat on my stile that presently I had the clearest doubts of my own identity and fell into the oddest metaphysical questionings.  “If this be I,” I said, “then how is it I am no longer madly seeking Nettie?  Nettie is now the remotest thing—­and all my wrongs.  Why have I suddenly passed out of all that passion?  Why does not the thought of Verrall quicken my pulses?” . . .

I was only one of many millions who that morning had the same doubts.  I suppose one knows one’s self for one’s self when one returns from sleep or insensibility by the familiarity of one’s bodily sensations, and that morning all our most intimate bodily sensations were changed.  The intimate chemical processes of life were changed, its nervous metaboly.  For the fluctuating, uncertain, passion-darkened thought and feeling of the old time came steady, full-bodied, wholesome processes.  Touch was different, sight was different, sound and all the senses were subtler; had it not been that our thought was steadier and fuller, I believe great multitudes of men would have gone mad.  But, as it was, we understood.  The dominant impression I would convey in this account of the Change is one of enormous release, of a vast substantial exaltation.  There was an effect, as it were, of light-headedness that was also clear-headedness, and the alteration in one’s bodily sensations, instead of producing the mental obfuscation, the loss of identity that was a common mental trouble under former conditions, gave simply a new detachment from the tumid passions and entanglements of the personal life.

In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the intensity, the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world.  It was quite clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all that was, in some mysterious way, over and done.  That, too, was the common experience.  Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs—­a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could disregard, they could attempt. . . .  And it was no new thing, no miracle that sets aside the former order of the world.  It was a change in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one bound had released them.  Some of them it had released to death. . . .  Indeed, man himself had changed not at all.  We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be; but the poison in the air, its poverty in all the nobler elements which made such moments rare and remarkable—­all that has changed.  The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed, looking again on life.