Let us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the
unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet
should pass through a "belt" of attenuated matter having the property of
dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That space
is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that we are at
one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at another
spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in the wake
of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still agitated by
our passage through them,--all this is as good as known. It is almost as
certain as it is that in our little annual circle round the sun are
points at which we are stoned and brick-batted like a pig in a
potato-patch--pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like
gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what?
What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward
which we speed?--into what malign conditions may we not at any time
plunge?--to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may
we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to a
jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our
solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one
day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human
brain, minding us all mad-wise.
By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the possibility
that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum? It seems to
you that you are not--that you go with freedom where you will, and use a
sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to many a lunatic
it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore. Many a plunging
maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself the Goddess of
Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in a chariot of
gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence that is any
better than he has of his. More accurately, I have none of mine; for
anything I know, you do not exist, nor any one of all the things with
which I think myself familiarly conscious. All may be fictions of my
disordered imagination. I really know of but one reason for doubting
that I am an inmate of an asylum for the insane--namely, the probability
that there is nowhere any such thing as an asylum for the insane.
This kind of speculation has charms that get a good neck-hold upon
attention. For example, if I am really a lunatic, and the persons and
things that I seem to see about me have no objective existence, what an
ingenious though disordered imagination I must have! What a clever
_coup_ it was to invent Mr. Rockefeller and clothe him with the
attribute of permanence! With what amusing qualities I have endowed my
laird of Skibo, philanthropist. What a masterpiece of creative humor is
my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly, and
persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with its
motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking
unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the forsaken
righteous, their seed begging bread,--did Rabelais' exuberant fancy ever
conceive so--but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.
Surely he is no common maniac who has wrought out of nothing the
history, the philosophies, sciences, arts, laws, religions, politics and
morals of this imaginary world. Nay, the world itself, tumbling uneasily
through space like a beetle's ball, is no mean achievement, and I am
proud of it. But the mental feat in which I take most satisfaction, and
which I doubt not is most diverting to my keepers, is that of creating
Mr. W.R. Hearst, pointing his eyes toward the White House and endowing
him with a perilous Jacksonian ambition to defile it. The Hearst is
distinctly a treasure.
On the whole, I have done, I think, tolerably well, and when I
contemplate the fertility and originality of my inventions, the queer
unearthliness and grotesque actions of the characters whom I have
evolved, isolated and am cultivating, I cannot help thinking that if
Heaven had not made me a lunatic my peculiar talent might have made me
an entertaining writer.