Then I woke and it took me a long time to realize fully that my father
was dead. And this realization suddenly struck me like a cold
whirlwind, making me shiver from head to foot.
The first hours after waking I was sure that it was he who had communed
with me, that he felt remorse for his rage at me in the last moments of
his life, and therefore cried and was unusually tender toward me. I
also thought his pointing to the ornamented wings of the butterfly
important and full of meaning, albeit not yet clear to me.
But the impressions of the day are so different from those of the
night, the two are so hostile, that they alternately seek to supplant
one another as absolutely as possible, as though by turns one had been
in the company of a religious devotee and an atheist, of a poet and a
dull philistine, of a spendthrift and a miser. No man so firm in
character but undergoes this influence. And it still regularly befalls
even me, after so many years, that at the end of day I face the night
with its wonders with critical unbelieving expectancy.
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