Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared
with a slightly different veneer, that is all. It requires a
slightly different stick to scrape it off. The raw animals beneath
are identical.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his
somnambulism, and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life
up which he has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the
universe, dreams sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders
metaphysically about his own blessed immortality.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food,
and sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away. And
there's the rub. He has to effect adjustments with the real world
and at the same time maintain the sublimity of his dream. The result
of this admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice
confounded. The man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes
such a tangled mass of contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he
has to lie to himself in order to stay asleep.
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