Let us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the
unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet
should pass through a “belt” of attenuated matter having the property
of dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That
space is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that
we are at one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at
another spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in
the wake of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still
agitated by our passage through them,—all this is as good as known. It
is almost as certain as it is that in our little annual circle round
the sun are points at which we are stoned and brickbatted like a pig
in a potato-patch—pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung
like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows
what? What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions
toward which we speed?—into what malign conditions may we not at any
time plunge?—to the strength and stress of what frightful environment
may we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to
a jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our
solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will
one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human
brain, minding us all madwise.
By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the
possibility that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum?
It seems to you that you are not—that you go with freedom where you
will, and use a sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to
many a lunatic it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore.
Many a plunging maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself
the Goddess of Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in
a chariot of gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence
that is any better than he has of his. More accurately, I have none of
mine; for anything I know, you do not exist, nor any one of all the
things with which I think myself familiarly conscious. All may be
fictions of my disordered imagination. I really know of but one reason
for doubting that I am an inmate of an asylum for the insane—namely,
the probability that there is nowhere any such thing as an asylum for
the insane.
This kind of speculation has charms that get a good neck-hold upon
attention. For example, if I am really a lunatic, and the persons
and things that I seem to see about me have no objective existence,
what an ingenious though disordered imagination I must have! What a
clever _coup_ it was to invent Mr. Rockefeller and clothe him with the
attribute of permanence! With what amusing qualities I have endowed my
laird of Skibo, philanthropist. What a masterpiece of creative humor
is my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly,
and persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with
its motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking
unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the
forsaken righteous, their seed begging bread,—did Rabelais’ exuberant
fancy ever conceive so—but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.
Surely he is no common maniac who has wrought out of nothing the
history, the philosophies, sciences, arts, laws, religions, politics
and morals of this imaginary world. Nay, the world itself, tumbling
uneasily through space like a beetle’s ball, is no mean achievement,
and I am proud of it. But the mental feat in which I take most
satisfaction, and which I doubt not is most diverting to my keepers, is
that of creating Mr. W. R. Hearst, pointing his eyes toward the White
House and endowing him with a perilous Jacksonian ambition to defile
it. The Hearst is distinctly a treasure.
On the whole, I have done, I think, tolerably well, and when I
contemplate the fertility and originality of my inventions, the queer
unearthliness and grotesque actions of the characters whom I have
evolved, isolated and am cultivating, I cannot help thinking that if
Heaven had not made me a lunatic my peculiar talent might have made me
an entertaining writer.