There was a bustle of ants in the heavy dust of the decaying wood, up and down the fallen trunk of the giant tree, now flecked with alternate bars of light and shade. Here as elsewhere life and death succeeded one another. Flowers bloom as flowers fade, creatures are born as others die, fresh springs rise up here as rivers grow dry elsewhere, crystals are formed as others split: and all the while earth goes forward towards its frozen fate. In high heaven the wheeling stars prepare themselves to receive life, or to grow desolate; all is in flux, transforms itself, repeats itself, dies: even what seems to us most assured and everlasting. While we ourselves, atoms of the universe, endure our sentence of imprisonment in life according to inexorable law, until the term of death.
In such a chaos, where, amidst millions of clashing forces, millions of destinies are being worked out, what can be the purpose of the all-seeing Eye? what inconceivable end has He designed for the living and for the dead, for the stars, for all creation? Our souls and bodies, our births and goings-out, the details and the wholes, what is the final inexpressible combination which will resolve them all? whither does the huge inexplicable movement tend?
In face of such a problem let us remember how we mitigate our terror by being able to take ourselves and our puny acts seriously. They are so small compared with the constellations of the stars, and yet they absorb us. We are able to laugh and cry, to love and hate, in our narrow bounds, forgetting for the while the agony of the unknown which encompasses us, and forgetting to ask the how and why, the purpose of each act of life, its relation to the universe. We are able to exist by and according to the impulses of our own flesh and spirit, as each species exists according to the particular measure and direction of its means.
The forest giant also had its time. A pine-seed after manifold adventures transformed itself, in a course of admirable permutations, into a mighty tree for more than seventy centuries. Yet its hour struck: and in its fate can be read the fates of all created things, after due allowance has been made for variety in age and kind and size. The giant at last lay in peace upon the fertile ground, having had its life, like us, and like us having nothing thereafter in eternity or in the infinite: though while it lived it obeyed the nature of its kind, and all powers in earth and heaven seemed leagued in its support.
So we do all, while we exist. In the small circle which it is happiness for us to fill, we repeat the experience of those who have gone before; and in the breathing air, in the shining light, the dancing heat, the darkening shadow, in the rhythm of the friendly world we carry through to the end the courses laid down for us. And vainly do we seek to learn not merely whence we come and whither we go, but what and why we are, while we exist.
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.