_The Mirror of Changeless Time_
The giant tree seemed almost to slumber in the still hazy light of
that autumnal afternoon. The sap appeared dispirited, weighed down
from tree-top to root by weariness. For some hundreds of years it
had not been working at full pitch. The time-worn trunk bristled
with dried lifeless branches in whose veins sap had ceased to flow
with life-giving effect: and in the covering of needles outside the
pine could be seen definite signs of age, even to the extent of sorry
bare patches. Its life had now gone dull and very distant, indeed
had become little more than a reflection of the old boisterous self.
April and August no longer budded into splendid vigour in its
utricles. For plants as for creatures perceptions become faint with
time, sensations get blurred, lights grow dim, till of the life of
yesterday nothing but a colourless print remains, a veiled
inconsequent activity. So dull stood the giant on this set November
day, as if half-asleep.
Perhaps it was recalling some wordless memory of its six thousand
springs? Did its tissues tingle with stored-up impressions? Perhaps
a confused sense of important events was moving in those physical
parts which had most directly received their impact. Up one side of
the time-worn trunk stretched an enormous scar, the relic of a gaping
wound where once lightning had struck and gashed the tree so that sap
ran out to waste. It took the giant more than a hundred years to
close that wound, a period which, for the tree, compared well with
the month in which our human flesh heals up: since time has no
beginning nor ending, is neither long nor short, has no
halting-places and never changes: its duration is relative to the
life of the things which are its vehicle, and expresses itself only
in them.
Accordingly the giant's decay, in terms, was like our own. It might
last for centuries, during which the weakness and partial inertia of
the tree would persist: whereas the decay of man is completed in
fifteen or twenty years. Yet declines, like lives, in perspective
will be seen to have differed only in degree. When man and tree have
ceased to exist their respective courses will be summed up in epochs,
short for the one and long for the other, but of the same category
and as easily tabulated:--for past events all fall into order since
they exist only as memories, without the qualities of action which
distinguished them in fact. In retrospect fifty years are like six
centuries, a year of the past scarcely longer than a charged dragging
minute of the present.
Let us imagine that the sequoia, on this misty autumn afternoon was
recalling its memories. It could a little titillate its cells by
remembering those uncounted days, sunny or overcast, those
storm-stricken or magical nights, those sharp or restful dawns. Its
six thousand years of memory would be to the tree what his sixty
years are to an aged man, for in memory and dream we have two means
which smooth away the unlike things in time, and give to it, for one
looking backward, an equality which active nature hardly possesses.
A dream-second or a second in memory may be a century as easily as a
year: just as actions which have taken thousands of years to complete
may finally have the same contour as little events of an hour. Our
eyes can enclose in their fixed impartial frame a huge landscape or a
tiny plot of space. What is passed has no existence except in
memory: while as for time--we carry it within ourselves, and pay it
out slowly or fast (or unconsciously) according to whether we are
busy or interested or indifferent. Hours are elastic periods, which
expand or contract according to the attention we pay them, and it is
our ideas and our passions which mark them off round the face of our
days.
Time may be imaged as a mirror, a confused mirror across whose
impassive face tens of thousands of scenes chase each other in a mazy
dance: for in it are reflected the innumerable and never-closing
consequences of all action, with all the lights, all the shadows, all
the extent and motions of the universe. The mirror itself is
changeless, and the semblance of movement lies in the reflection, in
that endless rout of fleeting images whose transience is to their
glass as our little moment to eternity. Our utmost capacity is to
project a thought-ray from our place and instant of existence back
into the night which hides our coming, or forward to the night which
waits our going--rays whose imagined courses towards the poles of the
infinite we cannot follow even in thought. Yet they are our only
links with past and future, those two names which together spell
eternity: the future a past not yet achieved, and the past a future
left behind.
Such would have been the thoughts of the sequoia (had it been able to
think like us) on this chill November day, as it stood there by the
grove of its sons and grandsons, the derived pine-trees which had
sprung up about it, yet had not, even the greatest of them, reached
to half its height: and something of the same train of thought might
have been started by the sight of the neighbouring forest, now in its
twentieth generation. These other trees had passed from youth to
maturity, and then grown old and died, changing their promise into
performance, and at last becoming a mere memory; and each stage of
their lives, each tree at every age was to be seen reflected in the
impassive glass of time, which kept of them no record nor trace, but
preserved itself intact against them, as against all phases of the
universe that had been, that was, that ever would be.
Years, hours, minutes and moments are not children of Time, but
circumstance made visible in some one or something. Only dreams seem
able to assert themselves beyond the face of time's unchanging
mirror. They shine and register, wheel and flit in the darkling mist
of eternity, with something of its power to embrace æons and seconds
alike. Like eternity too they harmonize and arrange the great things
of the universe with the least, with things so small that they leave
no mark even in the cloud-confines of the immaterial: and again like
eternity they have no beginning and no end, and so convey something
of the incommunicable character of chaos.
Thus in that lifeless November the giant seemed lost in a white
trance. If we are vivid in springtime, in autumn we wish for sleep
and dreams. A vagueness is the nature of the falling year. Up
above, in space, great deep clouds expanded gradually. They dragged
themselves along in languor, while their slow shadows darkened the
moist earth and climbed the stripped branches of the giant pine. In
this misty autumnal afternoon against its sad background all movement
seemed slack. A formless but dreamy instinct seemed implicit in
animals and plants and things. The minutes ticked off lazily in the
unearthly gleaming half-light, in this soft and yet magical
atmosphere above which the giant seemed to hang its head in reverie.
Its relaxed needles, weeping boughs and lined rugged trunk made up a
mournful-seeming disappointed whole. There was not a breath nor a
whisper in the air. Every shape, every colour, every scent, each
withering blade of grass supine on the earth, each pebble on the
plain, each ripple of light or trembling shadow seemed to give off a
similar emanation, a dull slow tonelessness which permeated the
toneless air, above, below, about. In one huge fissure of the bole
slept a bear, made torpid by the close thick weather. On the ground
near the foot of the tree in a tuft of dried grass a dog was
sleeping, the dim gaze of its half-open eyes veiled and turned
inward. Beside it on a raised turf sat a great insect, the hardly
visible vibration of whose wings seemed pensive too. Farther away,
but within sight from the tree-top, stood a hut whose people lay
silently watching the great clouds pass. They also were dreaming or
thinking, allowing the whims of the spirit born of this declining
season to play over what had been or what yet might be.
It would seem as though rare influences of all that is
incomprehensible and infinite in space, of the chaotic and
inconceivable in time, were sometimes allowed to echo down upon
things alive and things lifeless, and to swing them in a general and
harmonious way. Nature moves on for ever, sleeplessly and
untiringly, but from time to time the past seems to bode forward in
brief uncertain fashion, casting lights and shadows across the loom
of the present. The adamant Now may keep no trace of the dead Then,
but the ripples of the past none the less persist in ever-failing
widening rings, which pass out into the abyss as ghost-memories: and
these, falling sometimes upon the bark of a tree, or upon the nature
of a man, or the mind of a dog, or into a sea or a perfume or the
half-light of a dewy evening, evoke dreams and clothe the formless
with apparent form that it may have relation with material men and
things.