Such an idea comes to us because of the limited range of our knowledge and perceptions, our only criteria of judgment. In such conditions naturally it is the visible and tangible world which makes most effect on us. Yet we should remind ourselves that if a being under our eyes passes in a second from life to death, yet in that same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the mysterious courses of organic nature: just as while lightning is striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment, simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful heat of mother-earth, beyond our sphere of control. We should note that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical superiority over destruction, whether it concerns men or animals or plants. In truth we have no reason to complain that our senses have been reduced to such bare limits. How palpitant life would be for us if new faculties superadded to our old gave us to see the invisible, to understand the occult, to apprehend like plants, to feel in vibrations like light, to flow abroad like seas and contemplate the bounds of space.
Let it be enough if we record, without seeking to explain it by finding a parallel in our equipment, how singularly efficient our plant was in insinuating its roots where it would. With the aid of its pileorhiza it passed not merely through crumbling soil, but through stony strata, plaster, and wood. Another mystery, this, how so soft a substance could penetrate hard bodies, which we burst through only by means of a great effort of strength, using tools yet harder. The sequoia root, dipping downward in one direction, thrusting upward in another, without external aid split obstacles against which we have to employ iron and stone: and at last one fine morning its first shoot pierced the top layer of soil to salute the sun.
At this second the plant was, to our eyes, at last born. We commonly pass over its hardest battles, those conditioned by the circumstances of its origin. In reality it was while yet beneath the ground that the little sequoia tree experienced the mother-care of those kindly shades without which it could not have come to life: but few of us take note of that. We so commonly put the effect before the cause and the success before the effort. Yet our little plant went down as much as it went up, with roots very like its crests, though the one struck upward towards the sun, and the other struck downward through the night.
I would say that this inexplicable symmetry is one of the laws which govern the seen, and probably also the unseen, world. Ideas, beings, things, phenomena of all kinds exhibit to us much the same beginnings, similar developments, and parallel endings. This fact we can grasp only piecemeal, not in its whole; but it is clear that always there is an analogy between extremes. We know that plant-roots are like their heads. Dawn and twilight (opposed limits of a natural event) are like one another: the same pallid colours, the same freshness, the same effect of unambitious calm. Sunrise and sunset, respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our day-star, glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red. Old age and childhood, the two poles of human life, resemble one another in their feebleness and weak vitality. Our great joys are silent as our great sorrows; and the ecstasy of love is not far from the frenzy of hate. Nature is re-born in spring-tide, and falls sadly asleep when autumn closes: and yet these two seasons are very like—showers of rain and gusty winds, shot across with the same weak rays of yellow light.
We find this odd likeness of contrasts not merely in visible nature and in life, but also in the most subtle abstractions of the spiritual world. We expect a great happiness as anxiously as a great misfortune, and when we do things our first conception, and the memory which follows it, trace in our minds the same sort of hazy contour in fleeting neutral tint. The nescience of our birth is like our death's.
Oh! we know very well how some of these resemblances are caused—thanks to the action of the simple laws of physical nature—but our spirit fails when we ask why these analogies should appear with so strange and universal a regularity.
CHAPTER 5
Caught up into the Stream of Life
In the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous, in autumn with its melancholy mist, in winter when the wind blew cold and clean and sharp, our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years. For now it had become a tree, a giant sequoia pine. It stood a little clear of a forest in an open space, and so looked solitary. Its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven. The forest whose leaves danced tremblingly before its feet was made up of quite other trees: delicate lively things, of middle but swift height, and thin-branched, so that the wind and the sunlight wove patterns easily through their frail screen.
Against this background the seasons passed leisurely, the complete year seeming swifter than its parts: so that if an ever-living spirit could have fixed itself deep within the fibres of the giant trunk while the waves of time broke about it, and counted them as they came, it would have found centuries fly past as lightly as single years. If our faculties and standards of perception had been applicable to the pine, how beautiful we, in its place, would have thought the world! We would have noted the warmth, the sense of space, its limpid clarity: also the colours and shapes and scents of things; but did the tree know how splendid was the scene about it? At times we think that it must have been sensitive to certain things. Yet surely it could not see the distant hill rolling away to the skyline, gay and clean and bright in summer, but pale and solemn in winter. It could not admire the endless plain or the river winding near. It paid no attention to the azure sky in which it bathed itself, nor could it feel—at least not in any human sense—the caressing wind, the rough embraces of the frost, the cool breath of the water. Likewise it could not taste the open air, or know the day flashing round it, or be soothed by the calming shades of night. It was unable to feel, see, hear, or taste movement and light and noise and flavours, as we can; yet it received impressions to which we are blank, and united itself ardently or voluptuously or uneasily with the other elements of its existence. It would require a manufacture of new words (to fit sensations foreign to our nature) before our present understandings could appreciate plant-loves and hatreds, and the things which please them or give them discomfort.