"My friend Martin is the only one I know. But I imagine they are just the same. They expect their money to do their thinking for them. Money and crowds have just the same hypnotic effect. Do you remember on one of our tours when we were driving at night with the big headlight showing up the road fifty yards in front of us? It was a summer night, and as we flashed past trees the birds for a moment took us for the sun and began to wake up. It was amusing, the swish of the wind we made in the trees, the sudden singing of the birds, who sank to sleep again in the darkness we left behind us. And then as we drove along a woodland road a rabbit darted out into our light, and could not get out of it. If we drove slowly he ran slowly. If we put on pace to scare him away he kept ahead of us. If we stopped he couched down with his ears back and his eyes starting out of his head, absolutely confined by the walls of darkness round our light, and, I suppose, hypnotized by his own terror. It seems to me that human thought is a light like ours, and that individual men rush into it like the rabbit and cannot get out of it. It needs only a little plunge into the darkness to be back safe and happy in your own life, but they can't take the plunge. We were able to turn the light off the rabbit at a cross-road to let him go, but nothing can take the light of human thought off men. The analogy is rather interesting, because the light of human thought is not borne by a horrible engine, but only seems so to those who are hypnotized by their own terror, and it seems normal to be scurrying away from it and to die--morally--of exhaustion. A few men, when they come into the light, are brave enough to step out of it to discover whence it comes. They find it kindled in themselves and, tracing it to its source, they find it in the will to live, and they reach the determination to carry it farther over the world they live in, in order to break down the walls of darkness."
"That is rather beyond me," said Kurt. "I'm no good at ideas. If you let me keep to people I'm all right. Some people do me good; other people make me feel cramped and choked. I'm not clever enough to know why. And there are lots of nice people with whom it is quite enough if one can make them laugh. They don't seem to matter either way."