Just a charming little passage about something that in our 21st century has almost passed away - the experience of waiting for the mail.
"No one these days gets out of bed believing that today, perhaps, he will accomplish something undreamed-of and surprising; and yet at the bottom of his heart he trembles incessantly in the expectation that today something unpredictable and grand will happen, that something will come from somewhere....
"And most curious of all is that this state of eternal expectation overcomes even people who on the whole don't have anything to wait for; they don't have an uncle in America, they don't long for something from somewhere that would intervene in their lives, and they would be terrified if they had to accept a new assignment of some kind; and yet, at the postman's ring, they are seized with a glimmer of anxiety or hope that perhaps...who knows...something has come from somewhere in this large, strange world...God be praised, it's only some printed matter, an ad for coal by the truckload or in bags; but the eternal human hope that something unforeseen and wonderful will happen never definitively and irrevocably fails."
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