_Caught up into the Stream of Life_
In the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous, in autumn
with its melancholy mist, in winter when the wind blew cold and clean
and sharp, our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years.
For now it had become a tree, a giant sequoia pine. It stood a
little clear of a forest in an open space, and so looked solitary.
Its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the
blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven. The forest whose leaves
danced tremblingly before its feet was made up of quite other trees:
delicate lively things, of middle but swift height, and
thin-branched, so that the wind and the sunlight wove patterns easily
through their frail screen.
Against this background the seasons passed leisurely, the complete
year seeming swifter than its parts: so that if an ever-living spirit
could have fixed itself deep within the fibres of the giant trunk
while the waves of time broke about it, and counted them as they
came, it would have found centuries fly past as lightly as single
years. If our faculties and standards of perception had been
applicable to the pine, how beautiful we, in its place, would have
thought the world! We would have noted the warmth, the sense of
space, its limpid clarity: also the colours and shapes and scents of
things; but did the tree know how splendid was the scene about it?
At times we think that it must have been sensitive to certain things.
Yet surely it could not see the distant hill rolling away to the
skyline, gay and clean and bright in summer, but pale and solemn in
winter. It could not admire the endless plain or the river winding
near. It paid no attention to the azure sky in which it bathed
itself, nor could it feel--at least not in any human sense--the
caressing wind, the rough embraces of the frost, the cool breath of
the water. Likewise it could not taste the open air, or know the day
flashing round it, or be soothed by the calming shades of night. It
was unable to feel, see, hear, or taste movement and light and noise
and flavours, as we can; yet it received impressions to which we are
blank, and united itself ardently or voluptuously or uneasily with
the other elements of its existence. It would require a manufacture
of new words (to fit sensations foreign to our nature) before our
present understandings could appreciate plant-loves and hatreds, and
the things which please them or give them discomfort.
Our tree became part of its whole environment, of the hills, of the
plain, of the atmosphere and scents of things, by a constant
interchange of matter. Its sap was drawn from the depths of the
earth, and rose unchecked through each breathing cell up to the crest
of the tree. It flowed rapidly about even the very smallest pores,
and thence from the topmost twig fell again as fast (but this time
rich with new ingredients) to the lowest root. We can easily gauge
the chemical content of these ingredients, but nevertheless the
absorption on their passage of the nutritive particles remains a
mystery.
They are drawn from all the elements of which the world is made up,
even in its most opposed forms: and the various species of active
things, whether men or animals or plants, select those actual ones
proper for their nourishment, after their kind, and attract them
through space and time, through all the multitude of encompassing
forces, from solid matter, from vapours or from liquids, whatever
their appearance and whatever their composition. The sequoia, for
instance, drew to itself what was qualified to make rough its red
bark, to harden the fibres of its stem, to make smooth the green
composition of its needles; and drew them from the encircling air,
from the blue rays of light, from the mist of waters, from every
motion and scent about it. From the same vast whole, made up of
thousands of dissimilar bodies, the birds draw their plumage, the
tortoises their shells, the worms their rings, the flowers their
petals, and humankind their complexions, their blood and flesh.
We are fully aware that these substances are all carbon in divers
forms; but that raises the fresh question, when we ponder it, whether
the whole universe is not of a single sameness--a vision of
mind-wracking infinity repeating itself in a perpetual changeless
series? and that might lead us to stand in astonished awe before a
nature which can make a bone, or pearl-shell, or a wing-case, or a
claw, or an eyelash from the same elements whether they are of the
air we breathe, of the light shining from our eyes, or of any other
transformation of appearance or taste. However, even if the matter
be the same, the forces which cause it to take shape are infinite.
How many must be the sources of energy which together compose the
complete eternal mirror-disk of life, in which from time to time we
catch glimpses of vague forms, as it whirls on its mad course,
bearing away worlds too big for our failing minds to comprehend, or
too small for our blunted senses to distinguish?
Above all, this dazzling multiple disk teaches us motion and harmony:
that is to say, labour and love. The largest planet like the
smallest atom exists by combination and by movement. Look upon the
million needles of the sequoia pine, how they everlastingly breathed
in and out, drawing gases and water from the air and returning
others. The stomata never stopped work for an instant. Within the
seeds the sap worked as unceasingly. Nothing ever dwells in absolute
inertia for a moment anywhere. The atmosphere vibrates, light
pierces, hearts beat, water flows, the molecules of crystals build
themselves together, the stars revolve, the air stirs, the darkness
is propitious to growth: through everything is spun the cord of love
and labour.
Perhaps, when we contemplate the tireless labour of the bees and ants
as they run here and there, and reinforce one another in an endless
series of the same acts, with apparently their sole purpose in the
next generation--perhaps a dismal weariness steals over us at the
sight of such everlasting monotony of labour, and at a feeling that
their futile efforts much resemble our own; but we may legitimately
remind ourselves that our ignorance of the complete scheme of things
inhibits or at least vitiates our judgment; also that the chain of
succession, from father to son in an endless series stretching away
to infinity, is Nature's first law.
Just as nothing isolated happens in nature, so nothing exists which
is isolated or peculiar. What we call our individuality is only a
congeries of cells: just as what we call an adventure is a complex of
events tending towards a single defined end. It would be wrong for
us to pick out and treat of any single one of the tribulations of the
pine-seed on its described huge journey, except in relation to the
result of the history, the mighty tree towering like a red pillar
four hundred feet into the air. Likewise with our storied lives. We
will find nothing irregular in them if we realize that they existed
before they became patent, and that our minds became aware of them
only when they developed in some apparently fresh phase to which we
were peculiarly sensitive. A good example is the ray of light which
left a star centuries ago, but which we notice only as it enters our
limited field of vision.
The least important event has a history going back far beyond our
mind's reach: we cannot fix the start of any thing, or of any
creature, or of any circumstance. This enormous tree, whose shadow
falls across my book, and whose history we are tracing ... what began
it? How did the class of giant pine arise? The most evanescent
happening carries back through adventure upon adventure to infinity,
and if we could trace back everything to its first cause, probably we
would be astonished to find small consequences to things which we
think magnificent, and would find that our grandest created things
took their rise in ordinary and insignificant circumstances.
We may lawfully presume that the past has been universal, and that
the future will be the same; for probably everything happened in the
eternity which preceded us, and everything will certainly happen in
the limitless time which will succeed our paltry moments.
Where do we come from? What was our first shape? Academic questions
these, perhaps of no great urgency, but none the less difficult for
us to picture. We feel distinctly enough what is good or bad in our
experiences of the moment; yet we cannot in the least evade our
destinies; and our impotence supplies us with a reason for casting
out despair, and accepting with dignity what fate offers.
Seconds build up into minutes, and minutes into hours, and these into
the days of our life; and so also far-fetched trifles accumulate into
occasions. It depends on our circumstances whether they seek us out
or whether we go to them. Every being possessing activity, that is,
which has a relation with space and a temporary faculty of volition,
moves towards change as change moves towards him. The mobile beings,
such as men and beasts and birds, as often as they move, make
progress towards some small or large point in their history. Their
change of position makes them encounter the unexpected, which is
itself perhaps coming towards them. Our pine-tree, however, being of
the plant class, was rooted in one place, and had to attend its
changes there. For of course its history was full of change. In
seed-shape it had wandered across the world, its devious course lying
sometimes on the surface of the ground, sometimes in the water,
sometimes in the air. Now, being a tree, its wanderings were over;
but its normal life yet varied nearly from day to day. The scene (to
our eyes changeless) in which it stood no doubt changed without our
being able to see the differences. We have no bark or needles or
sap, and cannot therefore enter into the feelings of the tree which
with them knew how clouds modulated its light, how the passing wind
varied its scent and texture according to the distance or direction
from which it came, how the rain-drops tasted so one time and so
another time, their very elements seeming different according as the
seasons varied the sensitiveness of the great lonely tree.
Anyhow, we should remember that with plants it will not be as with
us. Lacking our faculties, they may yet be richer than us in other
directions, endowed with senses whose deficiency in ourselves we
cannot perceive: and perhaps even things have their senses. There
may really be "tears in things." It would be an attractive doctrine
that the energies which affect inanimate things may affect them in
sensible degrees, that the universe (which is a rounded whole) obeys
the same laws in forms which change according to circumstance, but
remain alike in force and means.