This
would account for his remembering so much of it with considerable
vividness. For instance, the impressions attending his first breakfast
on board the _Ferndale_, both visual and mental, were as fresh to him as
if received yesterday.
The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to
interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in
itself) makes to our understanding and emotions. For it is never more
than that. Our experience never gets into our blood and bones. It
always remains outside of us. That's why we look with wonder at the
past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing
callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in
that rapid blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine--which our life
is--nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at
the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such
exclamation: 'Well! Well! I'll be hanged if I ever, . . . ' it is
probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back
upon, other people's, is very astounding in itself when one has the time,
a fleeting and immense instant to think of it .
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