[Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy]@TWC D-Link book
Looking Backwards from 2000 to 1887

CHAPTER 20
5/9

When I first woke from that trance, my former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have learned to know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious changes that have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but very easy, to realize that I have slept a century.

Can you conceive of such a thing as living a hundred years in four days?
It really seems to me that I have done just that, and that it is this experience which has given so remote and unreal an appearance to my former life.

Can you see how such a thing might be ?" "I can conceive it," replied Edith, meditatively, "and I think we ought all to be thankful that it is so, for it will save you much suffering, I am sure." "Imagine," I said, in an effort to explain, as much to myself as to her, the strangeness of my mental condition, "that a man first heard of a bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime perhaps, after the event occurred.

I fancy his feeling would be perhaps something as mine is.

When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and the sorrow they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity, rather than keen anguish, as of a sorrow long, long ago ended." "You have told us nothing yet of your friends," said Edith.


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