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.