Part 7 (1/2)
If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I should do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it might be overdoing things a little.
I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United States of America, Hamps.h.i.+re County, Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts. I feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to an infinite number of things. As for joggling G.o.d's elbow or praying to Him or any such thing as that, under the circ.u.mstances, and begging Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes, and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a pet.i.tion to G.o.d to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.
I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of light--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, ”Now I will try to realize Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me....” Ties flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops (and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential, semi-public talk of the pa.s.sengers, the sudden collision with silence, they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.
The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self, nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to pick out with one's soul from Darkness. ”Here am I,” I said as the roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed through the blackness. ”Here I am in infinite s.p.a.ce, I and my bit of glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through deserts of s.p.a.ce, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and hold me.”
No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a G.o.d, but it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the s.p.a.ce there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is living or staying, the universe is his real address.
I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of it--the great s.h.i.+p with all its souls throbbing a planet through me and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, ”Where art thou?” I looked down upon myself as if I were a G.o.d looking down on myself and upon the others, and upon the s.h.i.+p and upon the waters.
A thousand breaths we lie Shrouded limbs and faces Horizontal Packed in cases In our named and numbered places, Catalogued for sleep, Trembling through the G.o.dlight Below, above, Deep to Deep.
How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about another--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if it were the only thing left a G.o.d could do to straighten matters out for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have wasted in this one, worrying about it.
Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as unimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a s.h.i.+mmering mist of worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe ... with a little horizon or teacup of s.p.a.ce set down over me. The whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.
I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit, would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or not,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of s.p.a.ce or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and petering along over a long, narrow row of years?
Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and through the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam I say, ”There is my omnipresence.” My being is busy out in the universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.
II
I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of which seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are worthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fas.h.i.+oned method that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical purposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are already being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many words, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or subtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live as we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.
I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take the time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite experiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another world.
It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an infinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed than one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do, is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.
If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one, then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a little abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why not leave it to G.o.d to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect anything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it anyway.
I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a theory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly still. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me, through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep gra.s.s. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in the gra.s.s--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I know their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And when I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds, tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess them. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of ages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun and the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who can shut me out from anybody's sunrise?
”Oh, tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven And one in my desire.”
I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can telegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no longer a great, serious, foreign-looking sh.o.r.e, conducting a big foolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless cities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out from over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my sky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a monopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have made an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.
The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.
Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my hands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands of my hands I work with it. I say ”I and the sky.” I say ”I and the Earth.” We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over with the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a kind of G.o.d's prayer. G.o.d's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully out in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly thought. G.o.d's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have signaled each other.
V
THE IDEA OF G.o.d
My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is; nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a G.o.d, I would not believe it. ”Where?” I would say, ”in which Bottle?” I have groped for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping for a G.o.d. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make out to find a G.o.d in that way. I wonder if anyone can.
I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things, pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow and reminds me that he has been looking for a G.o.d and tells me cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he has found Him, I wonder if he has.
The very necessity a man is under of seeking a G.o.d at all, in a world alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of G.o.d he would find would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his G.o.d in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.