One day as I was strolling down the sunlit street, I stopped dead in my tracks. Some of the things the little man had said suddenly came back to me with extraordinary force. It was as if I had been walking along a narrow single-track railway bridge and had abruptly been struck by the thought, ‘What shall I do if a train comes rushing towards me?’ Perhaps the time would come when I’d have to make such a decision. The idea made my heart pound like a hammer.
The little man told us one day about a derelict mine. The ore had given out and the miners had all moved to other pits. The power was still connected, however, and one morning the lights were turned on for a party of visiting journalists. One of the men got separated from the rest of the group and before he knew it, he was hopelessly lost in the maze of tunnels and passages which twisted about underground like the coils of some immense serpent. He must have rushed around, gradually becoming panic-stricken, in those weird, deserted corridors hundreds of feet below the ground. His shouts for help would have been deadened by the thick walls. And then he ran headlong into the open elevator-pit and fell hundreds of feet into pitch darkness.
This story made a great impression on me and it was long before I could rid my mind of the terrifying vision.
Gradually I came to think that, however monotonous and unrewarding my present work might be, I should at least be grateful that it was safe. “After all,” I said one evening, “why do we work anyway? When all’s said and done, surely it’s so we can earn enough to keep alive. In that case, it’s a complete contradiction to take a job where you’re risking your life.”
It seemed unbelievable to me that anyone should be so mad as to do work in which he might at any moment be killed. Later I was to learn that such logic does not always apply and that to break the unendurable monotony of their lives, some people will in fact do things which can only be classed as insane.
