Again, I forced myself to remain quiet, to see it.

Of course there was an added capability of which she knew nothing—the wealth I could bestow upon her mission, upon missions like it. And though this wealth was so vast some men could not have calculated it, I could calculate it. I could see in a large incandescent vision its limits, its effects. Whole village populations fed and clothed, hospitals stocked with medicines, schools furnished with books and blackboards and radios and pianos. Yes, pianos. Oh, this was an old, old tale. This was an old, old dream.

I remained quiet as I considered it. I saw the moments of each day of my mortal life—my possible mortal life—spent along with every bit of my fortune upon this dream. I saw this as if it were sand sliding through the narrow center of an hourglass.

Why, at this very minute, as we sat here in this clean little room, people starved in the great slums of the Eastern world. They starved in Africa. Worldwide, they perished from disease and from disaster. Floods washed away their dwellings; drought shriveled their food and their hopes. The misery of even one country was more than the mind could endure, were it described in even vague detail.

But even if everything I possessed I gave to this endeavor, what would I have accomplished in the final analysis?

How could I even know that modern medicine in a jungle village was better than the old way? How could I know that the education given a jungle child spelt happiness for it? How could I know that any of this was worth the loss of myself? How could I make myself care whether it was or not! That was the horror.

I didn’t care. I could weep for any individual soul who suffered, yes, but about sacrificing my life to the nameless millions of the world, I couldn’t care! In fact, it filled me with dread, terrible dark dread. It was sad beyond sad. It seemed no life at all. It seemed the very opposite of transcendence.

I shook my head. In a low stammering voice I explained to her why this vision frightened me so much.

“Centuries ago, when I first stood on the little boulevard stage in Paris—when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause—I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.

“Oh, there were other actors, worse and better; other singers; other clowns; there have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the mind of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment I can really understand: the kind of accomplishment in which the self—this self, if you will—is utterly whole and triumphant.