_The Theory of Eternal Sleeplessness_
What can chaos be but the mass of elements not yet conjoined with
those other atoms which have been embodied and which have returned to
the mass?
The fallen tree was now sunken in an endless sleep. The rays of the
sun playing over its ruined trunk gradually absorbed its colours.
The discoloured redness of its substance, the yellow of its rotted
dust, the fresh green of its last shoots slowly faded, while the
winds took away its antique smell and the blue atmosphere
re-incorporated the oxygen, the carbon, and the last elements of
moisture in its wood. Finally the whole shape of the former tree
disappeared, so that there remained on earth no visible or tangible
trace of its former inhabitant; though its substance still existed.
Its component parts could be found in the light and air, in the
clouds, in a vibration, a breath, on a stone, either in material
substances or in invisible radiations. They were the old elements of
the sequoia, exactly as they had been in essence, though now their
forms were so different that they conjured up no memories of the
vanished tree. On the analogy it may well be that the solid
particles, the liquids, the essences which together make up our
apparent forms, have had equally varied incarnations, have been
beautiful or vile, have been drab or splendid, have been
delicious-smelling, have encountered a thousand unexpected changes
and adventures before they were re-born as us. The energy which
moves us, the matter which gives us substance, the impulses which
excite us, the dreams which trouble us, and the occasional mysteries
which vibrate in our souls and bodies may come from sources thousands
of years old, and through a myriad phases of existence.
In face of these unexplored ramifications of our personality it seems
impossible that we should ever be able to tie effect to cause, or
learn the reason of these secret longings of ours, or of those
strange instincts and reactions, those preferences, those fears.
They come to us from so far, the forces which order our doings: and
though each element remains intact and unadulterated, yet signs of
the many moments they have passed embodied in various shapes cling to
them always, like fine dust.
One wonders whence came the particles which composed the giant tree,
from what previous embodiments, and into what shapes they reassembled
after the pine was dead. What had been green in the tree might be
black or transparent when next its elements took visible form. What
had made the tree seem solid might be liquid or vapour in the new
assemblage. The fragrant pine-fumes might be solid and common next
time. Common? Well, hardly perhaps, for there is neither beautiful
nor ugly, noble nor ignoble in the universe. Such qualities are
conferred upon things by their impact upon our senses. This or that
vortex of atoms which to-day gives us exquisite dreams may in a later
evolution be some combination utterly hateful to our taste. A
process which wounds us to-day may to-morrow bring forth a marvellous
constellation of molecules. The indestructible elements whirl
unceasing in the universe, moving from an out-worn structure to a new
one, dissolving and amalgamating without rest till they rejoin the
ever-lasting silence--whence they will leap out again to like
adventures, or towards yet unknown variations, in turn to scatter in
a dust of atoms. An embodiment may last for a day or for hundreds of
thousands of years; but its inevitable end is in the chaos of
infinity.
On the sun-bathed earth an irrefragable peace had at last drowned the
ruins of the tree. With its death one particular adventure in
creation was run. The forces which had made it tangible would
continue to function, but their specific combination as a pine-tree
was ended for ever. The forest giant henceforward would be as before
its birth--a part of the body of eternal nature. Around it the
rhythm of the world would flow, neither faster nor slower than of
old, with light and shadow, ice and fire, birth and death, all things
just as before, but not _it_: these similar conditions cannot be of
_this_ tree's atoms, nor partakers of _its_ life, nor a union of
_its_ elements. Its race was run: as in this world all things must
some while end. The tree with the ruddy trunk and green needles was
dead: and they are dead, or will die, those insects with the gaudy
wing-cases, the bright-scaled fish, the downy birds, the sharp-fanged
animals, proud mankind, diamonds of the purest water, black carbon,
seas, mountains, world and suns. The eternal universal is built up
of perishable parts, and our blind career is only a succession of
incidents like or unlike, a drawn-out flicker of beginnings and
endings, a steady stream of sensations, of bubbles swelling up and
bursting, one single life made up of a myriad lives. They beat and
flow and scatter, to be re-born after each change.
We are all ephemeral in terms of our allotted situation, and eternal
in terms of the universe. Everything which is still, as everything
which moves about us, is no more than a whirl of situations
constantly made and unmade: and so our substances, those which now
make up ourselves, will infallibly scatter us some day. Elements
seem to grow tired at last of being confined in one special shape, to
be weary of being so long a man, a stone, a river, a fire. Their
weariness is ours, in sum. We feel vigorous or weak, joyful or sad,
perturbed or resigned according to the prosperity of our cells: and
we all, whatever our age and health, encounter hours in which,
without reason given, our whole being longs for annihilation. At
other times--in common experience it happens often at that hour when
lamps should be lit--there swells up in us an indeterminate wish to
be other than we are: and our flesh goes dead, our hearts cold, our
heads empty of desire.
May this not be our dissatisfied elements, desirous of change,
speaking within us? And the often-just premonitions of death which
come to men, how explain them other than as the stirring of our
elements quickened by radiations from the unknown? The trouble of
those stricken by a sudden and mortal fate, their inexplicable
distress, the panic-stricken flock of teeming thoughts vainly seeking
escape in their shadowy subconsciousness--all this morbid poignant
possessed state must be due to our cells' foreknowledge that shortly
their architecture will be changed. Our independent life puts no
obstacle in the way of that universal ebb and flow, which sets
through us and subjects us to the same law of eternal change which
rules the rest of chaos.
For these reasons the close of a career should not be to us a
melancholy sight. To be born, to exist, to die should seem simple,
natural, unchangeable things, only shades of difference even when
considered to the farthest obscurity of their never-ending course.
But to be eternal, there is a vision which exceeds! To be eternal!
The universe withstands, unmoved, the passing of trees and beings and
things. In its season everything must defile before the mirror of
changeless time. Plants in their fading go the way of suns as they
grow cold, of dreams as they pass on waking, of an insect as it
perishes. In the imperishable universe things are born only to die.
We, as atoms of the stream of life, can stiffen ourselves with the
knowledge that we suffer only the common fate of all created things;
that the same fate rules both material and spiritual things, men and
stars following one curve in their careers; and that in nature no
situation can endure unaltered.
As we dwell on it, the idea of being eternal becomes impossible to
our spirits. To be infinitely active for ever, what a prospect of
overwhelming sameness! Perpetual life would be for us no less than a
never-ending sleeplessness. We would have to endure with a constant
endurance of constant circumstances, while others about us were born
and died, while plants grew green and withered, whilst the rivers
ran, and the suns burned themselves out; we would have to watch the
ebb and flow of things, and the measured flight of hours, the
evolution of form, the levelling of fine distinction. The same
dreams, the same senses would function, without ever a stop, without
ever a relieving variation--what a vision of weariness and monotonous
despair! Like a great wide eye in which were mirrored chaos and its
thousand ghostly shapes, an eye limpid but glassy, strained and
aching with its long stare, over which it was ordered that no easeful
lid might ever close.
Everlasting life for men an everlasting insomnia? Let us call to
mind some of those nights when sleep would not visit us, when
open-eyed we gazed into the dark as though it were luminous, our
temples all one ring of ice, and in our stagnant veins a biding
weariness which nothing could relieve. Life throbbed in our ears
with an unchanging beat. The air about us might be loud with rumour,
or be silent; there might be a clock ticking, or a storm raging in
the night outside, but anyhow, and however our mood, the
sleeplessness always in the end prevailed over all circumstances, and
knotted up the customary arabesques of our sensation into one
pattern, mechanical and terrifying in its regularity. A cold terror
would take hold of us--the lucid ordered distraction of severe
insomnia--and we would be lost in a passionless despair, in that
desert of opaque oppression which is ultimate fatigue.
Each cell in us called aloud on sleep, while our whole being thrummed
with the rhythm of life. The entire existence of the aged and the
very sick is an unended longing for repose, and no small part of the
agony and horror of a death-bed is this cruel wakefulness which holds
the eyes ever on the watch. Eternal peace has no terrors for the
dying: but if that necessary nescience was not to follow after, if
their wakefulness was to endure world without end--what then?
Despite our pains life is sweet, while it runs within its proper
bounds; but it would be intolerable if it were endless. On this
mortal earth the giant tree had passed into its last rest, leaving
the general current of life behind it to continue unchecked. The
sequoia, even if it had had the power, would not have been sorry no
longer to breathe in the odours of the world, nor feel the sunlight,
nor pump the sap up and down its weather-beaten trunk. At its hour
of death it was desiring death, the great sleep in which lay repose,
with all its strength, even with its finest stomata, its inmost
grain, its remotest root; and if this was the issue of its seven
thousand years, such should be the issue of a dog's corresponding
fifteen years, of a man's seventy years, of a planet's millions.
In the midst of eternity an age is not so long.
CONCLUSION
_Within a Cell_
Through all the changing pomp of seasons, while the sun showered down
its yellow rays, while the rain striped it with grey markings, and
the snow lay heavy and white upon it, the vision of the tree was
present to me, first as a colossal column, standing up in heaven,
then as a broken ruin, prostrate on the ground. As through a light
haze I have tried to distinguish the splendour of its life, and the
tragedy of its death: and all this while the blue and green and grey
country in which the sequoia lived and died has become in some degree
my own country, a part of me. I grew to love those distant hills,
modulating away to invisibility on some shining day of spring; I
learned to feel the sadness of the autumn twilights which made the
background of the pine-tree go so pale and lifeless and desolate. I
traced at length the slow circulation of the giant's sap, and became
sensitive like the tree to light and shadow, to all the influences,
exciting or soporific, of the type of country in which I had placed
it. Nevertheless, all this creation of a vast landscape, and the
huge form of the tree, took shape, endured, and ended in a tiny
space, one of those imperceptible and secret compartments called
cells, parts of our bodies immeasurable by human wit.
Outside my window the world was growing feeble in the failing autumn,
but from the white page which I slowly darkened with my writing
bloomed for my sight a summer scene of green and gold, where once the
giant tree had stood, but which now was again become clear ground and
azure sky: and I told myself how shortly my memory-cell would produce
for me a new mind-landscape, new images, new sentiments. Such
dreams, born within ourselves, have the vividness of real incidents,
while they last: to such a degree that it seems questionable whether
the physical shocks we undergo and the palpable matter we encounter
are really the intensest experiences of our lives. May it not be
rather that our sharpest colouring comes from the volatile and
obscure matter of our ideas and dreams, with its rich palette of
innumerable shades? Only by means of the abstract part of our nature
do we commune with the universe. Our likes and dislikes, our
delights and despairs are not the issue of our carnal parts,
offspring of our blood and nerves, except in so far as these are
submissive conductors of the hidden reactions of our imagination. A
single dream will change the current of our life, and our actions are
the product of the powerful but hidden inner world of our minds.
So that it is our imagination which rules our conduct. Our physical
performance is the reflex of our conception of the deed. Our will is
the developed image of the dark, fertile, capricious, imperceptible
force which we call fancy. We can mingle this fancy in almost
material fashion with all the things and beings on our path through
life, so strange in composition is this substance or fluid.
Everything which is ours, even our passions, obey its commands. It
can make us chaste or ardent, will purify our flesh in the presence
of our sisters, and inflame the same matter when our thoughts turn
concupiscently towards a woman with whom we can feasibly have
dealings. Fanatics owe their superhuman endurance during horrible
mutilations of the flesh to this same power, which also gives to
martyrs the perfect calm of soul in which they tread the threshold of
an awful death.
May not this flexible mistress of our understanding be made of the
same essence as the motive force of the universe? Not our reason but
our imagination enables us to grasp the conception of illimitable
chaos, to comprehend the music of the farthest spheres, to overleap
all distance and cast the sum of the faintest stars. By it we can
distinguish between world and world, in their far-fetched and
fleeting changes from the incandescent minute of the nucleus to that
last frozen silence in which the dead planets circulate: and also by
its means we can see the smallness of things, even when they are
atoms inexpressibly small.
Not that our imagination is universal. There are causes we will
never fathom, effects we can never know, forces too occult for us.
Yet we have monitions of them; their flickering image hovers
sometimes just beyond our grasp, their last repeated echo dies away
in a murmur just too weak for us to understand.
Therefore in the depths of our subconsciousness the immane with its
thousand heads mirrors itself vaguely, like a wide field agreeing to
compress its forms and rarefy its details within the tiny sphere of a
prismatic drop of water.
Our dreams take shape, and endure and fade, having seemed reality
while they endured. Images and sounds and scents of strange
marvellous richness dance restlessly through our inner world.
This other life which palpitates in us is often more engrossing to us
than our public life, and always more fickle. It has no bounds, so
far as supply of incident and vision is concerned: but is absolutely
limited (as much as is our physical life) in its extent of influence.
Its scope is for ourselves alone. Our designs are made and our
actions prepared in this domain of our dark fancy, and the adventures
we there conceive only lose in richness and range when they are
translated into physical terms. Of that realm we are absolute
master, and we rule our universe thence. In it time and space both
bow at our behest. By a simple whim we transpose seasons in a
moment, that we may inhabit tropics and the frozen north at once.
Elements and creatures and things are at our mercy. In this world,
and only in this world, are we given to know freedom and omnipotence.
How do things go in this secret and magical realm of ours, where we
have power to work the miracles denied us in daily life? There we
can love and hate, as we would wish to do, physically, can taste the
fill of love's joys, and all of ambition or of crime. We can change
our shape, attend the marvellous revels of fairy-land, witness
horrible massacres, contemplate the incredible clash of suns. In
this our private world neither days nor hours exist to limit us. We
can live a thousand centuries in a moment, or spin out a moment
across unending years. This dream-control of matter empowers us
somewhat to understand the terrible play of events across eternity
and the infinite, for it must proceed rather in the same manner: and
since the thousand flying shades of chaos can be reflected in our
subconsciousness, it follows that our fancy and our dreams must be
made of the same stuff as the nameless force which rules the universe.
The forest giant also had its life in a dream--a life which seemed to
last for more than seventy centuries, in the precise surroundings
wherein stood this substantial ghost. The dream which made it did
not fade wholly with its death, for to my fancy clouds of wood-dust,
with their sad musty taste, seemed yet to float after its fall over
the vacant place where the tree had stood.
My memories of the landscape in which the dream had passed endured
after the ending of the dream. Birds seemed to fly over the
prostrate giant, and thousands of busy insects flitted about its
hollow trunk. The sound of the water came yet to me from far off,
while the sunlight was golden where the tree had breathed, and night
drew its dark curtain round the spot. A mighty rumour filled the
space about--for in the subtle world of dream lively truth is given
by our imagination to shapes and sounds and smells, which become ours
to create, to destroy, or to revive at will.
And from my middle place, hanging between the external world which is
ours and the inner world which belongs to me alone, I ask myself,
hesitating and afraid, if our dreams are not perhaps more than
dreams, if we ourselves are not perhaps creations of some fancy
greater than our own, greater even than our understanding? In which
case the external universe might be to the all-seeing Eye what the
world of our imagination is to us--another way of saying that one
substance makes substantial the mighty whole, but that the means, the
forces, the expression of it are innumerable.
It is a strange speculation that we may be ourselves products of the
creative thought of some being beyond our thought: yet very
far-reaching is the power of our imagination which can pass from star
to star, can people space, and conjure up new worlds, can shadow out
to itself the incomprehensible. It is afraid of no height and of no
depth: but one idea escapes it, gives it dizzy pause--speculation
upon the beginning and the end of creation. Yet in time our spirit
calms itself, grows resigned to the idea that there was no beginning,
and will be no end, only an interminable progression. Such is the
only sober escape from the unbearable notions of a precise beginning
and a pre-destined final end, ideas which if driven home would wreck
our peace. A beginning--but how could this be? Whence could it
come? and when and how? and an end--but what could come after that?
Would it be the starting-point of a new evolution, of a fresh
departure in time? Besides, the very ideas are absurd,
self-contradictory. Nature has no exceptions, no isolated events.
In such a haze of strange ideas and confused visions my dream draws
to its close. However, we do not make them of hazardous and fugitive
web. Into them are woven real figments of our life and immanent
seconds from the stock of unchanging time. Their elements will float
forth across the universe after the dissolution of the adventures
whose apparent, if mental, form they have for the moment composed.
These scattered moments of my faded dream will distribute an
impression of the life of the great pine-tree, which was born and
lived and died in its place, till the sense of it pierces to a tiny
immeasurable point, one of those secret places which we call our
cells ... and then it seems to me that there rises a thin mist of
russet wood-powder, amid a heartrending savour of old age....