I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand
and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow
of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has
something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.
But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.
Always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect
in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It
is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing
could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly
perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world
for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its
utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The
deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.
And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and
barrenness--knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine--is
only second to it.
March 11.
Sometimes when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar.
To-day it went to Greece.
Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!
There was a wide, long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And
there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to
the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world--two
beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the
farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last
they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were
tall, dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They
murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the
sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled
in shy, ecstatic joy--for the wind was their best-beloved. There
were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that
drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth.
And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were
glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with
rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of
bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and
the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they
were of gold.
Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of
the sea!
Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming,
with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with tints of
carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow
sand on the shore. The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand
made a picture of marvelous beauty. She was flushed in the joy of
new life.
But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was
more beautiful than Aphrodite.
I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted
with the pain that beautiful things bring.
The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!
“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those
three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.”
My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there,
and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears.
And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young
women--oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and
more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but
that is pure and joyous and in Peace--in long, still, eternal
Peace. And every life comes there to its own; and every earth-cry
is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of
Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone--gone,--beyond the
gateway of Heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among
the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it
touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into
their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of
each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and
searching over the earth after Truth--and who has found it? But
here is it beyond the gateway of Heaven. Those who enter in know
that it is Truth at last.”
And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold
rocks.
And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.
Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud, and
the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocks and left them
white--very white in the wide water.
The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald
moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the
motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the
wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled
with each other and became one vague, shadowy element--and from
it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and
barrenness.
The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it
a long, long time.
March 12.
Everything is so dreary--so dreary.
I feel as if I would like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest
bit less unhappy afterward--but this life is unutterably weary. I
am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things.
I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.
When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was
certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years
old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought,--and one would not
be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it
was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was
very hard to understand.
But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said. I will
know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was
even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.
And again I said--faintly--everything will become clearer in a few
years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been.
But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that
is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little.
Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been--and now I
am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different
when I am five-and-twenty.
For I know that it will not be different.
I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness,
the same loneliness.
It is very, very lonely.
It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.
It is more than I can bear.
Why--_why_ was I ever born!
I can not live, and I can not die--for what is there after I am
dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.
Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.
March 13.
If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One
could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.
But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the
sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that
mysterious pain.
Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?
It is these mingled senses that torture me.
March 14.
I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear,
and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange?
Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other
things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some
other things also?
Is thy servant a dog?
March 15.
In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and
barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.
My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless
ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living
and the dead. It may have been green once--green and fertile, and
birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may
have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It
may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the
centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and
no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its
transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility,
or rolling prairie, or barrenness--it is only itself. It has a
great self, a wonderful self.