I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is
not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints
and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own
eyes. Whitman's indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch
will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our associations
with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal
instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe.
The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The
physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the
spiritual aspects--only the elect can see them. Our physical senses
are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else
becomes as dreams and shadows.
I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that
all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as
indestructible as the great Cosmos itself--all that is physical must
remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical,
but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a
child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is
evanescent, why not the other?
Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious,
such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials!
Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of
myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of
change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores;
she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It
is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her
processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an
ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and fragrance of
humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity
was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very
mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled
with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious,
and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.
This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but
only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body,
still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations,
under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and
falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the
fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose
thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer
flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world,
and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved
through the ages--the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it
has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes
out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of
mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the
Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and
something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a
legitimate product, and we must look upon death as a legitimate part
of the great cycle--an evil only from our temporary and personal point
of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.