Part 6 (1/2)
Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the dark, ”And I am here, too!”
Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel Himself?
And so it has come to pa.s.s, this vision I have seen with my own eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body, going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and s.p.a.ce.
Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist, the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of the s.h.i.+ps.
Between the seas and skies The Shuttle flies Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep, Thousand-sailed, Half in waking, half in sleep.
Glistening calms and shouting gales Water-gold and green, And many a heavenly-minded blue It thrusts and shudders through, Past my starlight, Past the glow of suns I know, Weaving fates, Loves and hates In the Sea-- The stately Shuttle To and fro, Mast by mast, Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.
Flights of Days and Nights Flies fast.
It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fas.h.i.+on the modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great s.h.i.+ps silently striding the sea, and rolling out the roads of continents.
If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him, ”Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?”
The trains like spirits flock to him.
There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my pocket it sings.
In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.
I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to tell the truth.
II
THE IDEA OF SIZE
Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain, not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.
Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets worse than other people's genealogies.
But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.
Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering generality.
I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling, every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, ”Are not the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds I cannot see.”
The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through s.p.a.ce. What I really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small or large all s.p.a.ce cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it, every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be old-fas.h.i.+oned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very big earth--at best--the way G.o.d made it first. He made a single spider that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a little compa.s.s. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.
III
THE IDEA OF LIBERTY
Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.