Simply
feeling, considering, and caring for what was before his
eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His out-
look upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now
and then: that projection of consciousness into days
gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym
for the pathetic and the future a word for circum-
spection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past
was yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day
after.
On this account he might, in certain lights, have
been regarded as one of the most fortunate of his
order. For it may be argued with great plausibility
that reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease,
and that expectation in its only comfortable form -- that
of absolute faith -- is practically an impossibility; whilst
in the form of hope and the secondary compounds,
patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant
fluctuation between pleasure and pain.
Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the
practice of expectation, was never disappointed. To
set against this negative gain there may have been
some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the
higher tastes and sensations which it entailed.
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