Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality--even
though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what
follows is not philosophy but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when
he discussed the immortality of the soul in his _Phædo_, said that it
was proper to clothe it in legend, _muthologein_.
First of all let us recall once again--and it will not be for the last
time--that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in
itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies
indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and
distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with
indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (_Ethic_, Part
III., Props. VI.-X.).
It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not
existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize
absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine
to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when
you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the
representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility
of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.
We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing.
The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of
self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped
cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its
lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be
myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to
merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to
extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into
the infinite of time. Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be--at
least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be
the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing!
All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or
not to be" have, or that passage in _Coriolanus_ where it is said of
Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity,
eternity!--that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is
called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize
himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal.
From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this
tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung
bitter cries--from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," _skias onar_, to
Calderón's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as
dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than
Calderón's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a
dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman
makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams.
The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and
heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which
neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling
of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing
that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills
life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in
reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny,
overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of
appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is
overcome and liberty is law.
Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
be for ever! to be God!
"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.
The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This
thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is
the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green
serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through
which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the
diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows
about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery
whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me
with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my
spirit with the blood of divinity.
Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a
farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that
touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather
than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels
thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a
monster."
It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that
ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions,
and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the
other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and
does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an
animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From
what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness
shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly
severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the
world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs
desire to possess another life than that of the world itself. And so the
earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead
themselves should die again.
When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency
of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the
dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses.
It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the
ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the
permanent habitations.
This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves
religions. In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre
induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and
"the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul," the
Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to
turn to corruption.
A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless
of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially
diseased. A disease? Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is
thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this
disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From the depth of this
anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into
the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to
behold the stars once again--
_e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._
Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of
anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and
imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all
things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the
objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground
slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a
swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you
yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness,
merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.
I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed,
that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme
unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty
coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.
A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!
If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.