12–14
Heraclitus
Zeus, this lot seems likely to remain on our hands.
Zeus
Put it aside, and up with another. Stay, take the pair from Abdera and Ephesus; the creeds of Smiles and Tears. They shall make one lot.
Heraclitus
Come forward, you two. Lot No. 4. A superlative pair. The smartest brace of creeds on our catalogue.
Fourth Dealer
Zeus! What a difference is here! One of them does nothing but laugh, and the other might be at a funeral; he is all tears—You there! what is the joke?
Democritus
You ask? You and your affairs are all one vast joke.
Fourth Dealer
So! You laugh at us? Our business is a toy?
5
Democritus
It is. There is no taking it seriously. All is vanity. Mere interchange of atoms in an infinite void.
Fourth Dealer
Your vanity is infinite, if you like. Stop that laughing, you rascal.—
And you, my poor fellow, what are you crying for? I must see what I can make of you.
Heraclitus
I am thinking, friend, upon human affairs; and well may I weep and lament, for the doom of all is sealed. Hence my compassion and my sorrow. For the present, I think not of it; but the future!—the future is all bitterness. Conflagration and destruction of the world. I weep to think that nothing abides, All things are whirled together in confusion. Pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, great and small; up and down they go, the playthings of Time.
Fourth Dealer
And what is Time?
Heraclitus
A child; and plays at draughts and blindman’s-buff.
Heraclitus
Are mortal Gods.
Fourth Dealer
So! Conundrums, fellow? Nuts to crack? You are a very oracle for obscurity.
Heraclitus
Your affairs do not interest me.
10
