"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Egotism or The Bosom Serpent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality.
Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before had held himself so
scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to
this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a
monstrous egotism, to which everything was referred, and which he
pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice of
devil-worship.

He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and
gloried himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience of
mankind, by the possession of a double nature, and a life within a
life. He appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity- not
celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal- and that he thence derived
an eminence and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than
whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a
regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals
nourished no deadly monster. Oftener, however, his human nature
asserted its empire over him, in the shape of a yearning for
fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend the whole day in
wandering about the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an
aim to establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the
world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in every
breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so keen a perception of
frailty, error, and vice, that many persons gave him credit for
being possessed not merely with a serpent, but with an actual fiend,
who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever was ugliest
in man's heart.

For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had
cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the
throng of the street, laid his hand on this man's chest, and looking
full into his forbidding face,

"How is the snake today?"- he inquired, with a mock expression of
sympathy.

"The snake!" exclaimed the brother-hater- "What do you mean?"

"The snake! The snake! Does he gnaw you?" persisted Roderick.
"Did you take counsel with him this morning, when you should have been
saying your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your
brother's health, wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy,
when you remembered the profligacy of his only son? And whether he
stung, or whether he frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout
your body and soul, converting everything to sourness and
bitterness? That is the way of such serpents. I have learned the whole
nature of them from my own!"

"Where is the police?" roared the object of Roderick's persecution,