DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... You speak about that feeling of fulness of the
heart with which we look at a thing,--half angered by inability to
analyze within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the feeling
is unanalyzable, simply because, as Kipling says in that wonderful
narrative, "The Finest Story in the World," "the doors have been shut
behind us." The pleasure you felt in looking at that tree, at that
lawn,--all the pleasure of the quaint summer in that charming old
city,--was it only _your_ pleasure? There is really no singular,--no
"I." "I" is surely collective. Otherwise we never could explain fully
those movements within us caused by the scent of hay,--by moonlight
on summer waters,--by certain voice tones that make the heart beat
quicker,--by certain colours and touches and longings. The law that
inherited memory becomes transmuted into intuitions or instincts is
not absolute. Only some memories, or rather parts of them, are so
transformed. Others remain--will not die. When you felt the charm of
that tree and that lawn,--many who would have loved you were they able
to live as in other days, were looking through you and remembering
happy things. At least I think it must have been so. The different ways
in which different places and things thus make appeal would be partly
explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences reaching
through the longest chain of life, and the highest. But no pleasure of
this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the
charm of an ancestral home--in which happy generations have been. Then
how much dead love lives again, and how many ecstasies of the childhoods
of a hundred years must revive! We do not _all_ die,--said the ancient
wise man. How much of us dies is an unutterable mystery.
Science is rather provoking here. She tells us we are advancing toward
equilibration, to be followed by dissolution, to be succeeded by another
evolution, to end in another disintegration--and so on forever. Why a
cosmos must be dissipated into a nebula, and the nebula again resolved
into a sun-swarm, she confesses that she does not know. There is no
comfort in her except the comfort of doubt,--and that is wholesome. But
she says one encouraging thing. No thought can utterly perish. As all
life is force, the record of everything must pass into the infinite.
Now what is this force that shapes and unshapes universes? Might it
be old thoughts and words and passions of men? The ancient East so
declares. There can be rest eternal only when--not in one petty world,
but throughout all the cosmos--the Good only lives. Here all is, of
course, theory and ignorance,--for all we know. Still the faith ought to
have value. How would the well-balanced man try to live if once fully
persuaded that his every thought would affect not only the future of
himself, but of the universe! The other day something queer happened. I
was vexed about something wrong that had been done at a distance. Some
days after, one said to me: "The other day, while you were so angry,
people were killed"--mentioning the place. "I know that," I said. "But
do you not feel sorry?" "Why should I feel sorry?--I did not kill
anybody." "_How do you know you did not? Your anger might have been
added to the measure of the anger that caused the wrong._" Unto this I
could not reply. Thinking over the matter, indeed, who can say what his
life may be to the life of the unseen about him?
Ever very affectionately,
LAFCADIO HEARN.