2
It matters not: that uncertain, indiscernible, fleeting and precarious ego is so much the centre of our being, interests us so exclusively, that every reality disappears before this phantom. It is utterly indifferent to us that, throughout eternity, our body or its substance should know every joy and every glory, undergo the most splendid and delightful transformations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air, star—and it is certain that it does so become and that we must look for our dead not in our graveyards, but in space and light and life—it is likewise indifferent to us that our intelligence should expand until it takes part in the life of the worlds, until it understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a few almost always insignificant facts accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys.
“I care not,” says this narrow ego, in its firm resolve to understand nothing, “I care not if the loftiest, the freest, the fairest portions of my mind be eternally living and radiant in the supreme gladnesses: they are no longer mine; I do not know them. Death has cut the network of nerves or memories that connected them with I know not what centres wherein lies the point which I feel to be my very self. They are thus set loose, floating in space and time; and their fate is as alien to me as that of the most distant stars. All that befalls has no existence for me unless I can recall it within that mysterious being which is I know not where and precisely nowhere and which I turn like a mirror about this world whose phenomena take shape only in so far as they are reflected in it.”