Our
lives are perfectly insignificant, aren't they? We know it for a fact.
But we don't like it. We don't like being of no account. We want some
thing to make us feel more valuable than we are. Consequently we invent
a fiction to explain away that insignificance--the fiction of a
personality overhead everlastingly occupied in watching every single
one of us, and keenly engrossed in our welfare. If this were the case,
we would cease to be insignificant, and we might try to oblige him by
not killing each other. It happens to be a fiction. Get rid of the
fiction, and your feeling of complexity evaporates. I perceive you are
in an introspective mood. Worrying about some pastoral epistle?"
"Worry about my values, as you would say. Up to the present, Keith, I
don't seem to have had time to think; I had to act; there was always
something urgent to be taken in hand. Now that I am really lazy for the
first time, and in this stimulating environment, certain problems of
life keep cropping up. Minor problems, of course; for it is a
consolation to know that the foundations of good conduct are immutable.
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