I have little doubt that the cremation of my husband’s body cut short
a process which in the normally buried man continues until no trace of
organic substance remains.
The first kiss of the furnace awoke an activity so violent and so vivid
that all the past paled in its lurid light.
The quenchless agony of the pang is not to be described; if alleviation
there were, it was but the exultation of feeling that this was final.
Not only time, but all expansions of time, all monsters of time’s womb
were to be annihilated; even the ego might hope some end.
The ego is the “worm that dieth not,” and existence the “fire that is
not quenched.” Yet in this universal pyre, in this barathrum of liquid
lava, jetted from the volcanoes of the infinite, this “lake of fire
that is reserved for the devil and his angels,” might not one at last
touch bottom? Ah! but time was no more, neither any eidolon thereof!
The shell was consumed; the gases of the body, combined and recombined,
flamed off, free from organic form.
Where was Arthur?
His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly destroyed. As
separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness.
And I heard this utterance; or rather this is my translation into
English of a single thought whose synthesis is “Woe.”
Substance is called spirit or matter.
Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, indestructible.
Infinite and eternal change!
Infinite and eternal pain!
No absolute; no truth, no beauty, no idea, nothing but the whirlwinds
of form, unresting, unappeasable.
Eternal hunger! Eternal war! Change and pain infinite and unceasing.
There is no individuality but in illusion. And the illusion is
change and pain, and its destruction is change and pain, and its new
segregation from the infinite and eternal is change and pain; and
substance infinite and eternal is change and pain unspeakable.
Beyond thought, which is change and pain, lies being, which is change
and pain.
These were the last words intelligible; they lapsed into the eternal
moan, Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! in unceasing monotony that
rings always in my ears if I let my thought fall from the height of
activity, listen to the voice of my sensorium.
In my sleep I am partially protected, and I keep a lamp constantly
alight to burn tobacco in the room; yet too often my dreams throb with
that reiterated Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe!
X
The final stage is clearly enough inevitable, unless we believe the
Buddhist theories, which I am somewhat inclined to do, as their theory
of the Universe is precisely confirmed in every detail by the facts
here set down. But it is one thing to recognize a disease, another to
discover a remedy. Frankly my whole being revolts from their methods,
and I had rather acquiesce in the ultimate destiny and achieve it as
quickly as may be. My earnest preoccupation is to avoid the preliminary
tortures, and I am convinced that the explosion of a dynamite cartridge
in the mouth is the most practicable method of effecting this. There
is just the possibility that if all thinking minds, all “spiritual
beings,” were thus destroyed, and especially if all organic life could
be annihilated, the Universe might cease to be, since (as Bishop
Berkeley has shown) it can only exist in some thinking mind. And there
is really no evidence (in spite of Berkeley) for the existence of any
extra-human consciousness. Matter in itself may think, in a sense, but
its monotony of woe is less awful than its abomination, the building up
of high and holy things only to drag them through infamy and terror to
the old abyss.
I shall consequently cause this record to be widely distributed. The
note books of my work with Arthur (Vols. I–CCXIV) will be edited by
Professor von Buehle, whose marvellous mind may perhaps discover some
escape from the destiny which menaces mankind. Everything is in order
in these note-books; and I am free to die, for I can endure no more,
and above all things I dread the onset of illness, and the possibility
of natural or accidental death.