"Once I was tempted by a townsman," said the wanderer, "but instead of
converting me with his town, he was himself converted by the country.
"For many years I wandered by seashores, asking questions of the sea.
When I came to the sea it was singing its melancholy song, the song
that it has sung from its birth, and it paused neither to hear nor to
answer me. Ever rolling, ever breaking, ever weeping, it continued its
indifferent labour. I walked along its far-stretching sands, leaving
footprints which it immediately effaced. I clambered upon its cliffs
and sat looking out to sea for days, my eyes shining like lighthouse
fires. But the sea revealed not itself to me. Or perhaps it had no
self to reveal. And I could not reveal myself to it; but the sea
expressed itself to me as a picture of my mystery.
"I wandered inland to placid lakes, the looking-glasses of the clouds.
I threw pebbles into their waters, disturbing their pure reflections,
but the disturbances passed away harmlessly into nothingness, and the
lakes once more reflected the sky.
"Then I said to my heart, 'We must wander over all the world in search
of my homeland, but chance shall not be my guide. I shall loose the
reins to thee. Where thou leadest I will follow.'
"I followed my heart through verdant valleys up into a mountain high
above a great town. And there for some while I made my abiding place.
For I had learned that from a mountain I could see further than from
a valley. In the towns my horizons had been all walls, but from this
high mountain I looked far over the world.
* * * * *
"One day there came towards my mountain a townsman who tried to lure
me to the city below. He was too tired to climb up to me, but from low
down he called out,' You unhappy one, come down out of the height and
live with us in the town. We have learnt the art of curing all
sorrow. Let us teach you to forget it, and live among our many little
happinesses.'
"And I answered him, 'It is our glory that we shall never forget.'
Nevertheless I was tempted and came down.
"The townsman was exceedingly glad, and even before I reached the
gates of his city he said to me, 'In after years you will remember me
as the man who saved you.'
"'How?' said I. 'Am I already saved?'
"'No,' he replied. 'But in the town is your salvation. You will find
work to do, and you will not need to return to your mountain to pray.
You will understand that work itself is prayer--_laborare est orare_.
Your prayer towards the sky was barren and profitless, but prayer
towards the earth, _work_, will give full satisfaction to your soul.'
"And I mocked him.
"'What lie is this?' I said. 'How do you dare to confuse labour and
prayer? Learn from me, my friend, that work is work, and prayer is
prayer. It is written in the old wisdom--"Six parts of thy time shalt
thou work for thy bread, and on the seventh thou shalt pray." _Orare
est orare; laborare est laborare_.'
"On the outskirts of the town there were men paving the streets.
'Behold how these men pray!' exclaimed my companion. 'They pave the
streets; that is their prayer. They do not gaze at the stars; their
eyes are ever on the earth, their home. They have forgotten that there
are any stars. They are happy!'
"'Their souls sleep,' I answered him.
"'Quite so,' he replied, 'their souls sleep and thus they are happy.
They had no use for their souls, therefore we purveyed them sleep,
"balm of hurt minds." We gave them narcotics.'
"'Tell me your narcotics.'
"'The Gospel of Progress--that is our opium; it gives deep sleep and
sweet dreams. It is the most powerful of drugs. When a man takes it
once he takes it again, for it tempts him with the prospect of its
dreams.'
"'I shall not taste of it,' said I, 'for I prize Truth above all
dreams. What other narcotics have you, sleep-inducing?'
"My companion paused a moment, then replied:
"' There are two sovereign remedies for the relief of your sorrow, a
life of work, or a life of pleasure. But work needs to be done under
the influence of the Gospel of Progress. Without a belief in progress,
man cannot believe that work is prayer, and that God is a taskmaster.
His soul wakes up. He commits suicide or crime. Or he deserts the
city, and goes, as you have done, up into the mountains.'
"'One narcotic helps out the other,' I hazarded.
"'Quite so. Pleasure is the alternative remedy, a perfectly delightful
substitute for your life: wine, the theatre, art, women. But as in
taking laudanum, one must graduate the doses--take too much and you
are poisoned--'
"'Wine,' I said. 'I have heard of it. It has been praised by the
poets, and its service is that it makes one forget! The theatre, its
comedies and farces and cunning amusements all designed to help me to
forget! Art with its seductions is to obsess the soul with foreign
thoughts! Women who languish upon one's eyes and tempt with their
beauties, they also would steal away our memories. I will have none of
them.'
"'I spoke of women in general,' said my tempter. 'But think of one
woman marvellously wrought for thee, the achiever and finisher of
thy being, the answer to all thy questionings, the object of all thy
yearnings. In the town thou wilt find the woman for thee, and she will
bear thee children.'
"'You misinterpret my needs, O friend of the town,' I said. 'I do not
look to the stars to find a woman. My yearnings are not towards a
woman of this earth. Well do I know that you have offered me the most
deadly delusion in this woman, _perfectly wrought for my being_. You
have taken hold of all my inexpressible yearning and have written over
it the word _woman_. And when one of us irreconcilables marries, it
often happens that he forgets his loneliness and loses the sense of
his mystery. His wife becomes a little house which he lives inside,
and his soul is covered up and lost by her. Where he used to see the
eternal stars, he sees a woman, and as he understands her, he thinks
he understands himself."
"'But consider,' proceeded my tempter, 'the woman who is exactly the
complement of yourself, a woman marvellously and uniquely fashioned
to round you off and supply your deficiencies, and use your
superfluities.'
"'If such there be,' I replied, 'I shall not seek her in the town.
I know what you mean. I ought to make a home and rear up the second
generation. I ought to renounce my own future and dedicate myself to a
child so that the mistakes in the old may be set right in the new. I
must try to put a child on the road that I missed when I myself was a
child, put it in the old coach, perhaps, with a passport in its hand.
Even so, that solves no problem, rather multiplies my own problem.
What is deathless in man is not answered in that way. What does it
profit man that mankind goes on? We cannot tell. But it is clear that
we learn nothing new thereby. Rather, as it seems, we forget what we
have learned.'
"My friend smiled and said, 'You will think differently later.'
Meanwhile he brought me into the heart of his town, a great city of
idolaters and opium-eaters. And he took me to the gaming tables of
pleasure and the gaming tables of work, and he sought to enchant me
with figures and hypnotise me with the gleam of gold. He showed me how
fortunes were made in roulette and in commerce, and tried to bring
upon me the gambler's madness. And I smiled and said:
"'Behold the eyes of yonder gambler; his soul is asphyxied with gold.
He pays that homage to the base gleam of a metal that I do to the
light of the stars. He is an idolater.'
"In the centre of the city a terrible fear troubled my soul, for it
realised that it alone in all this great city of souls preserved
its conscience and its wakefulness. By the glare of men's eyes it
understood how all were somnambulists. We walked among millions who
walked in their sleep. And in their sleep they committed terrible
crimes. They looked at me with eyes that saw not; at the bidding of
strange dreams they went forward secretly.
"I beheld the thousand mockeries, and chief among them the mockery of
our eternal mystery. Instead of the church that is the dome of heaven
itself they had built churches of stone. And the people, urged by
their dreams, congregated themselves in these churches and were
ministered unto by false priests. And dreams of truth conflicted with
nightmare enacted themselves. The churches fell out among themselves,
and the people fought one another. False priests stood by irresolute,
their soft, shapeless lips having been smoothed away by maxims and old
words. And they stood in front of idols in a semblance of defence.
"I pushed many priests aside; I thrust my sword through many idols.
"'Come,' I said, 'your town is terrible. Let me away into my mountain
again. You wish me to consider this world worthy of me; you offer me
its small things in exchange for my great thing. You have not even
small things to offer. Farewell!'
"'And what is your doctrine?' he said to me at parting. As if we had a
doctrine!
"'For you,' I said, 'the worship of the explained; for us the
remembrance of the inexplicable.'"