CHAPTER 14
_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....