How often we find in ourselves hopes, desires, griefs, apparently unrelated to our own experiences and circumstances! They come to us from very far, these feelings, and in answering to them we follow a mysterious and indiscoverable chain of forerunners. Their fate is to some extent our own. Like memory (activity's retreating shadow), their sensations mix and mirror themselves brokenly in us, quickening in us hesitant, half-felt surmises about their final cause, or as to why these reflections of a long-lost age are sent to us.
The play of external events upon our destiny seems to us as inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within. The tiny seed, for example, in circumstances apparently hostile and unfavourable to its development, yet by a few exact but unexpected actions of others, found itself free to work out its fate; and to work it out just after a moment when it had seemed indefinitely delayed.
We men living under the sun can usefully apply the lessons of our own existence to this case. We are very far from grasping the whole scheme of the forces which dispose our lives; indeed, we get only faint occasional sidelights upon them. They strike our attention often because of the mysterious symmetry with which certain things seem to happen. We call them good and bad periods when an order of events occurs to help or hinder our fortunes; and it is significant that there should be a family likeness in such series of affairs. The vision of the lean and fat cows in the Bible is only one instance of this age-old observation; and we have also noted that cases apparently hopeless sometimes contain, beyond our sight, their own happy issue which bursts into view through a union of unexpected and apparently unrelated circumstances. This law sways not merely our human affairs but universal fate. Does the all-creating Eye really see and set in motion His whole universe rhythmically, in tune with one principle which is concealed from our sight by the terrifying complexity of detail in daily life in the visible and invisible worlds?
If so, the universe takes shape as a harmonious whole. What we know and what we do not know of the millions of existences everywhere at any time all are driving towards a common end. From the littlenesses here and the greatnesses there would emerge, perhaps, for those who could see it, a whole immeasurably, inconceivably huge. The atoms seem a mass to us, sometimes, though doubtless they differ among themselves. Men, despite their individual characters, appear, when seen in bulk and from a distance, as a group-whole, comparable with bees or ants. From far enough our earth, despite its diversifying hills and plains and valleys, would seem a smooth body; and if some being could comprehend the entire universe at once, by means and from a view-point beyond our understanding, what would it look like all-together?
That no man will ever tell us.
CHAPTER 3
The Kindly Darkness
Buried between two layers of soil the little pine-kernel woke from its inactivity. Underground was warm and moist; and therefore the seed swelled up with comfort, and relaxed itself with pleasure. The damp crept through it, right through it, with a gentle persistence in marked contrast with the brutal attack of the flood which had swept it away but had not broken down its stubborn defence. The heat of the subsoil made the seed ferment, and summoned it to live; but the mysterious centre of life in it found a fellow-feeling in the equally mysterious darkness which wrapped it about, full of the unaccountable impalpable emanations of all life upon earth.
For this dark we have an unreasonable fear, and it is curious to inquire into the causes of the horror of blackness which fixes itself in our hearts at the moment of their first pulsations. The black is soothing, whence therefore our agony at thought of it? Why do our heads swim when we look at a graveyard and reckon the darkness of the tomb; and the nothingness, in its grip, of things which have been but will be no more? Half-stifled we read a name inscribed on the marble slab, and imagine the unknown dead man as he lived—what he did, whom he loved, how he suffered—and we conjure up in our minds the poor blank wraith, now for ever departed from the light of day.
We can go further, and from the one build up the army of those who have lived, of those alive, of those who will live after us: and these unknown shadows press about our familiar faces, flutter and crowd in and out of the stage-properties of our own existence—like dead leaves in the autumn winds. Particular shapes haunt us with disquieting persistency. We find ourselves in streets, or at shows, or in public parks in the midst of a mob of people whom we do not know, but who live beside us; and we hear them speaking, and can picture to ourselves what they care about. They are of all ages, old and young, men, women, children, black-eyed, blue-eyed, grey-eyed, with fair or dark hair or hair withered white, full-lipped, or with lips shrivelled by passing time; but all of them are living, are there, glad or sorry, before our eyes. An idea takes possession of us and strengthens in us till we tremble with it. We think—"All these individuals about us, whom we could touch as they move, and whom we know to have feelings and hopes and preoccupations, all these beings are destined to disappear one day, whatever they do, wherever they may be, no matter how strong, how well-founded, how firm. In a hundred years they will just have existed, will be nowhere discoverable. What will have become of them?" And again we see the cold, forbidding cemeteries, with the ranked and serried silent tombs all shut fast among their flowers. We shiver at the thought that there, under the cover-stones, beneath the turf, below thick layers of soil, are only blanched bones scattered through that dark which makes us tremble with the notion that it is in some strange fashion our enemy.