He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating
downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew
that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his
mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping
again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a
leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond,
he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something--at anything--that
would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing
sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this
current--which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side,
and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the
graveyard--this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther
away from the thing to which he was clinging--from this thing he
could not let go because it was himself--because it had separated and
distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe.
"I've always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a
multitude. There are at least a million of me--and any one of them
might have crowded out all the others if he'd got a chance.
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