_The Wheel of Life Lived_
Time then is not to be divided into centuries and hours and minutes:
but just as each atom figures a world in itself, so each moment is an
eternity, one link in an endless chain which binds the remotest past
to the remotest future. Time's mirror may look with changeless face
upon the tens of thousands of events which defile before it and pass
away leaving no mark;--but that is not to say that these events are
without issue, since their consequences ripple out into space for
ever and ever. What has happened never wholly ceases to happen. To
mankind a sentiment of it may return in many forms--in a snatch of
music, in a perfume, in some subtle vibration or illumination of the
atmosphere--and these returns are authentic parcels of the original
moment, for time is to be divorced neither from material nor
immaterial things. This Present, which to us will so soon be Past,
keeps, as it flies, something of its true essence, and will revive
its influence a year, a century, thousands of centuries later, in
some scent or sound, or unforeseen collocation of circumstance.
This continuing process gives us our only approach to the conception
of eternity, for there could be no endless time if the hours lived
only once and for all, and then died irremediably. Seconds which
have their passage grow enriched in its course and cease, only to
revive in a new form, after the same fashion as ourselves who, when
death has resolved us, will live again in other combinations of our
elements, no particle of which can be lost in space or time. Each
second comprehends eternity, as each atom the infinite, and the
course of all that is in the universe is rotary, an orbit constant as
those of stars or of electrons. Everything wheels about space in
circles; and probably movement in time is also circular: so that when
we find ourselves strangely imagining things which have been, or
things which may sometime be, we can explain ourselves to ourselves
with the reflection that our momentary path has doubtless that second
crossed the emanations of some instant fully lived by another, long
ago.
The sensation that we have already seen or lived or heard something
is similarly explained. Each active moment is an amalgam of
sentiments and wills and multiple elements which split apart as soon
as the purpose is achieved. The moments of its duration then scatter
through space and time, taking with them remains of their charged
sounds, colours, and scents, with atmospheres of joy or sadness not
fully perceptible by our limited senses, but certainly to be opined,
and almost to be felt. We may pursue this train of thought a little
farther, and be prepared to accept that certain places derive a
special atmosphere from the events of which they have been the
setting, and may preserve it indefinitely. We are often sensible of
particular associations which hang about such and such a feature: one
place may instil terror, and others peace, disquietude, mystery, or
love, without any apparent quality in their disposition to account
for the possession of such power. The reason is that the events or
thoughts or actions of which they have been the scene have left
traces within the four walls of the room, in the branches of the
tree, or in the various features of the place. In fact, the seconds
of old time are yet living there, loaded with old association, and as
they whirl and vibrate they sensitize us with their invisible rays.
If we were endowed with new faculties, sensitive to such influences
as now escape us, and with them were able to apprehend and analyse
these scattered fragments of the past, these waifs of dead
adventures, then we might be able to reconstruct the deeds and lives
and deaths, all the unplumbed combinations of circumstance in the
cities or countries of our passage. This invisible swarm of "seconds
which have been" hems us about, wherever and whenever we go, with its
traces of suffering and of delight, of unrest, of clashing, of
colour: for the emanations of our souls (like those of the souls of
things) are heavy with various essences which may grow faint, but
never altogether perish.
In this dead November air a soft musical murmur seemed to hang round
the giant tree, as if it were mourning its old age and sadness. In
this autumnal dreaminess the tree was living again some of its passed
life, hearing the times and moments thronging by, contrasting (even
in its least fibre) the brilliancy of yesterday with the sadness of
the failing present. The numberless radiations of the air which for
centuries had made florid its stem seemed to-day to renew about it
their health-giving vibrations. This dust of time, the elements of
old situations great and small, had come from near or far as the case
was: perhaps from the beginning of things in the depths of the abyss.
To-morrow, when the great tree would be no more, it might affect
other forms, and make fertile other existences.
We go abroad in a throng of atoms, the basic materials of distant and
diverse forms of life. Sometimes they breathe upon us, sometimes we
hear them, sometimes we see them. At other times they move us to
love or hope or fear, melt us to tenderness, brace us to deep
efforts, or daze us with weird portents. To this vagabond star-dust
we can ascribe a sometime fit of passion or wrath, of madness or joy.
The world about us is all peopled with these spirit-mists. We live
red moments and white moments, odorous or musical moments, moments of
pain or love, brief or slow, loud or peaceful. Space, to repeat,
builds up nature out of its own substance: and likewise unchanging
time makes use of its own essence to assemble and arrange and fix the
order of events.
Evening came down wan and weeping over the uncertain scene. The mist
thickened into clouds like smoke, whilst silence and a baseless
lethargy soaked through the sluggish air. The giant tree loomed
straight and huge in the twilight, its form as ever, its colours
those which it had assumed on so many evenings. Neither shape nor
appearance was different from those with which it had fronted the
autumns of many years, and their intricate pallors; but never before
had it looked so desolate in the desolate splendour of its setting.
Its sadness was as patent as the sadness of the landscape: and since
neither the content nor the surface of this November gloaming
appeared different from those of past autumns the source of this
changed feeling had to be searched for. There was no motion in the
tree, nor stirring of a blade of grass, nor strange gleam through the
fog; nor did the chill air feel endued with a particular quality: yet
this depression over the world was true and heavy, weighing down all
spirits and things from some unknown direction, and by imperceptible
means. It could only have been the product of secret universal
influences vibrating in space as a cloud of invisible particles able
to link time to matter, as dreams to reality.
The giant was weary, the giant was sick: and the mysterious sorrow of
its pain was diffused about it like an odour. The low clouds
continued to collect together, darkening with their purple masses the
violet striations of the unwholesome sky. The still country-side was
suddenly stirred by a faint shudder. It was that the sun had set.
The first approach of evening yet held relics of the light of day:
and through it came another sudden tremor, which awoke the slumbering
air, and the inert earth, the pale grass, the scattered pebbles in
the plain, the roosting birds, the beasts in their dens men in their
houses, and insects in their inmost hiding-places. The pine-tree in
turn felt this invisible convulsion penetrate strangely from its
crest to its roots.
The convulsion was invisible, indefinable, and immense, and yet its
cause seemed wholly hidden. What was this swarm of vivified instants
(lived perhaps millions of years ago) which had drifted into the
district of the giant pine? How far had they come, these fulfilled
seconds, whose course had once been run? Were they the time- and
space-enfeebled echo of a cataclysm in some unknown world? (when? and
where?) or the travail of a blind sun lost in space, yet casting its
ominous enigmatic messages across the worlds?
These very real astral influences, active upon men and also upon all
that exists, are understood by us usually in an unworthy and
insufficient degree. It is admitted that we are at times bound by
the forces of distant heavenly bodies, but this can hardly be as
individuals, nor can their waves, when they sway us, be sent forth
expressly on our petty account. We must not be so simple as to think
that the existence of any one among us can interest or engross the
whole activity of a sphere or that its labouring is to make smooth
the way of a single man. We feel its influence when our path crosses
the direction of its discharged waves; but all beings, all plants,
hills, peoples, countries in the same case are influenced at the same
time as ourselves, and in a like fashion.
This may explain why associations of things are sometimes swayed to a
common feeling or purpose by invisible means. We often note that a
sense of gaiety or of suffering, of liveliness or of resignation, of
calm or disquietude imposes itself on us and on our neighbours, quite
independently of our own state of mind. Both animate and inanimate
things are subject to such changes of state, which may last a long or
a short time, may be restricted or general, but which generally lead
their objects in an undesigned direction. Such forms have probably
played a wide and yet undetected part in the history of mankind, and
also in the physical history of the globe: they may account for some
of our unexpected and abrupt departures from the usual manner, for
the irregular impulses which make us commit acts foreign to our
normal will and nature. So that the unknown, into which pass our
dead acts and ideas, may itself conceal also the sources of our
resolutions and of our performances.
The evening closed in yet more, its clouds slowly veiling the
heavens, while the mists thickened, and covered up the ground: yet
the unnameable trouble, which so mysteriously gripped the region, had
faded as mysteriously as it had come. Unchanged, in its surrounding
silence and circumstances stood the giant, serene once more. True it
was still tired, and the sap in its veins felt enfeebled by advancing
age; but the sense of misery and desolation just now weighing upon it
had been lifted. The dismal pomp of invisible minutes of grief had
wended its way past, invisibly. These sad, dark, disaster-laden
minutes--from what black event, and whence had they been derived?
What incalculable journey had they made? and whither would their
uncontrolled and endless course next tend? And the great tree
itself, standing there so stiff under that autumn sky, so remote from
ours--what can have been these detached moments of its life and being
which come from its stem to interest us, to bring to our lamp-lighted
room the ghosts of its joy and the shades of its pain? What were
these acts, these enjoyed moments of the giant's life, that they can
so float about us, murmur to us, hold our interest, that even to our
dreams come memories and broken incidents of what it was? that as the
tale of its death draws near to be told, we feel grief for that huge
ruddy trunk?
Perhaps it is because the thoughts which take wing from our souls, as
from the souls of things, are so many parcels of vital essence, which
pass over the face of the mirror of changeless time, and look into it
and are pictured there, and then break up and rearrange themselves,
but never die.