/lit/ - Literature

>>12517546
>At the beginning of the last year of his life, he fell into a custom of taking immediately after dinner a plate of tendies, especially on those days when it happened that I was of his party. And such was the importance he attached to this little pleasure, that he would even make a memorandum beforehand, in the blank-paper book I had given him, that on the next day I was to dine with him, and consequently that there was to be tendies. Sometimes it would happen, that the interest of conversation carried him past the time at which he felt the craving for it; and this I was not sorry to observe, as I feared that tendies, which he had never been accustomed to, 9 might disturb his rest at night. But, if this did not happen, then commenced a scene of some interest. Tendies must be brought ‘upon the spot,’ (a word he had constantly in his mouth during his latter days,) ‘in a moment.’ And the expressions of his impatience, though from old habit still gentle, were so lively, and had so much of infantine naïveté about them, that none of us could forbear smiling. Knowing what would happen, I had taken care that all the preparations should be made beforehand; the tendies were unpacaged; the oven was peheated; and the very moment the word was given, his mother shot in like an arrow, and plunged the tendies into the oven. All that remained, therefore, was to give it time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to Kant. All consolations were thrown away upon him: vary the formula as we might, he was never at a loss for a reply. If it was said—‘Dear son, the tendies will be brought up in a moment.’—’Will be!’ he would say, ‘but there’s the rub, that it only will be: Man never is, but always to be blest.’
>If the mother again cried out—‘The tendies are coming immediately.’—‘Yes,’ he would retort, ‘and so is the next hour: and, by the way, it’s about that length of time that I have waited for them.’ Then he would collect himself with a stoical air, and say—‘Well, one can die after all: it is but dying; and in the next world, thank God! there is no eating of tendies, and consequently no—waiting for it.’ Sometimes he would rise from his chair, open the door, and cry out with a feeble querulousness—‘Tendies! Tendies!’ And when at length he heard the mother’s step upon the stairs, he would turn round to us, and, as joyfully as ever sailor from the mast-head, he would call out—‘Land, land! my dear friends, I see land.’