I have lived for three thousand years; I am weary of men and of the
world: this earth has become too small for such as I; this sky seems a
gray vault of lead about to sink down and crush me.
There is not a silver hair in my head; the dust of thirty centuries has
not dimmed my eyes. Yet I am weary of the earth.
I speak a thousand tongues; and the faces of the continents are
familiar to me as the characters of a book; the heavens have unrolled
themselves before mine eyes as a scroll; and the entrails of the earth
have no secrets for me.
I have sought knowledge in the deepest deeps of ocean gulfs;--in
the waste places where sands shift their yellow waves, with a dry
and bony sound;--in the corruption of charnel houses and the hidden
horrors of the catacombs;--amid the virgin snows of Dwalagiri;--in
the awful labyrinths of forests untrodden by man;--in the wombs of
dead volcanoes;--in lands where the surface of lake or stream is
studded with the backs of hippopotami or enameled with the mail of
crocodiles;--at the extremities of the world where spectral glaciers
float over inky seas;--in those strange parts where no life is, where
the mountains are rent asunder by throes of primeval earthquake, and
where the eyes behold only a world of parched and jagged ruin, like the
Moon--of dried-up seas and river channels worn out by torrents that
ceased to roll long ere the birth of man.
All the knowledge of all the centuries, all the craft and skill and
cunning of man in all things--are mine, and yet more!
For Life and Death have whispered me their most ancient secrets; and
all that men have vainly sought to learn has for me no mystery.
Have I not tasted all the pleasures of this petty world--pleasures that
would have consumed to ashes a frame less mighty than my own?
I have built temples with the Egyptians, the princes of India, and the
Cæsars; I have aided conquerors to vanquish a world; I have reveled
through nights of orgiastic fury with rulers of Thebes and Babylon; I
have been drunk with wine and blood!
The kingdoms of the earth and all their riches and glory have been mine.
With that lever which Archimedes desired I have uplifted empires and
overthrown dynasties. Nay! like a god, I have held the world in the
hollow of my hand.
All that the beauty of youth and the love of woman can give to make
joyful the hearts of men, have I possessed; no Assyrian king, no
Solomon, no ruler of Samarcand, no Caliph of Bagdad, no Rajah of the
most eastern East, has ever loved as I; and in my myriad loves I have
beheld the realization of all that human thought had conceived or human
heart desired or human hand crystallized into that marble of Pentelicus
called imperishable--yet less enduring than these iron limbs of mine.
And ruddy I remain like that rosy granite of Egypt on which kings
carved their dreams of eternity.
But I am weary of this world!
I have attained all that I sought; I have desired nothing that I have
not obtained--save that I now vainly desire and yet shall never obtain.
There is no comrade for me in all this earth; no mind that can
comprehend me; no heart that can love me for what I am.
Should I utter what I know, no living creature could understand;
should I write my knowledge no human brain could grasp my thought.
Wearing the shape of a man, capable of doing all that man can do--yet
more perfectly than man can ever do--I must live as these my frail
companions, and descend to the level of their feeble minds, and imitate
their puny works, though owning the wisdom of a god! How mad were those
Greek dreamers who sang of gods descending to the level of humanity
that they might love a woman!
In other centuries I feared to beget a son--a son to whom I might have
bequeathed my own immortal youth; jealous that I was of sharing my
secret with any terrestrial creature! Now the time has past. No son
of mine born in this age, of this degenerate race, could ever become
a worthy companion for me. Oceans would change their beds, and new
continents arise from the emerald gulfs, and new races appear upon the
earth ere he could comprehend the least of my thoughts!
The future holds no pleasure in reserve for me:--I have foreseen the
phases of a myriad million years. All that has been will be again:--all
that will be has been before. I am solitary as one in a desert; for men
have become as puppets in my eyes, and the voice of living woman hath
no sweetness for my ears.
Only to the voices of the winds and of the sea do I hearken;--yet do
even these weary me, for they murmured me the same music and chanted me
the same hymns, among aged woods or ancient rocks, three thousand years
ago!
To-night I shall have seen the moon wax and wane thirty-six thousand
nine hundred times! And my eyes are weary of gazing upon its white face.
Ah! I might be willing to live on through endless years, could I
but transport myself to other glittering worlds, illuminated by
double suns and encircled by galaxies of huge moons!--other worlds
in which I might find knowledge equal to my own, and minds worthy of
my companionship--and--perhaps--women that I might love--not hollow
Emptinesses, not El-women like the spectres of Scandinavian fable, and
like the frail mothers of this puny terrestrial race, but creatures of
immortal beauty worthy to create immortal children!
Alas!--there is a power mightier than my will, deeper than my
knowledge--a Force "deaf as fire, blind as the night," which binds me
forever to this world of men.
Must I remain like Prometheus chained to his rock in never-ceasing
pain, with vitals eternally gnawed by the sharp beak of the vulture of
Despair, or dissolve this glorious body of mine forever?
I might live till the sun grows dim and cold; yet am I too weary to
live longer.
I shall die utterly--even as the beast dieth, even as the poorest being
dieth that bears the shape of man; and leave no written thought behind
that human thought can ever grasp. I shall pass away as a flying smoke,
as a shadow, as a bubble in the crest of a wave in mid-ocean, as the
flame of a taper blown out; and none shall ever know that which I was.
This heart that has beaten unceasingly for three thousand years; these
feet that have trod the soil of all parts of the earth; these hands
that have moulded the destinies of nations; this brain that contains a
thousandfold more wisdom than all the children of the earth ever knew,
shall soon cease to be. And yet to shatter and destroy the wondrous
mechanism of this brain--a brain worthy of the gods men dream of--a
temple in which all the archives of terrestrial knowledge are stored!
. . . . . . . . .
The moon is up! O death-white dead world!--couldst thou too feel, how
gladly wouldst thou cease thy corpselike circlings in the Night of
Immensity and follow me to that darker immensity where even dreams are
dead!