When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.
Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was ‘the last’, the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His I was the converse of the imperial We.