An Accident - Page 2

sky.
And one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the
elbow as if warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse.
Then I knew that the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse
was like a living thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly
as they seemed to me; many details I may have missed or mis-stated;
many details may have, so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road.
I remember that I once called one of my experiences narrated in this
paper "A Fragment of Fact." This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact.
No fact could possibly be more fragmentary than the sort of fact
that I expected to be at the bottom of that street.

. . . . .

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally
found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy has
a deeper meaning than democrats understand; that is, that common
and popular things, proverbs, and ordinary sayings always have
something in them unrealised by most who repeat them. Here is one.
We have all heard about the man who is in momentary danger,
and who sees the whole of his life pass before him in a moment.
In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is obviously
a thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accident
or a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets
he had ever taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever
passed the brown bread and butter.

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards
the traffic of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth
behind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases.
I did really have, in that short and shrieking period,
a rapid succession of a number of fundamental points of view.
I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds.
My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere men
is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded
a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper
name has ever been found. The ancients called it Stoicism,
and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean
(if they mean anything) when they talk about Pessimism.
It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that happens--
as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously enough,
came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic.
It was a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that
life was much too important ever to be anything but life.
I hope that this was Christianity. At any rate, it occurred
at the moment when we went crash into the omnibus.

It seemed to me that the hansom