The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

"I believe it. But it goes beyond my responsibility and beyond my care. Our responsibility goes no further than our comprehension. I am simply obedient to what I recognize as my noblest and highest inclinations. I act according to the beat of my knowledge. The responsibility I leave to Him, who gave us our impulses and our faculty of judging, whose wisdom and sensibility are so far exalted above ours as a human body is exalted above the most ingenious machine invented by man. But though now I am powerless to exert a direct influence, I shall not give it up and shall not rest. I shall write down everything and testify of Him. And He in His own way and in His own time, will bring it all into regard and into practice."

"Perhaps through our child," said my poor wife; and my firmness forsook me.

XXXI

The child of our love lived only one day.

When, a hundred years earlier, it befell my brother Lessing that he lost his only-born after a single day of life, he bitterly reviled Christ in his sorrow. With cutting sarcasm be lauded the wisdom of this child, who would not enter life until he was dragged into it with tongs of iron, - and the same night departed again.

My brother Lessing was a devout man, but yet not sufficiently devout to revere the beauty, the majesty and greatness of Human Being amid the suffering he had to undergo. The true, living Christ had also called him to testify, and he did not in his testimony spare the Bible-Jesus, the artificial product of human fancy. But the belief in the future Glory of Mankind for which the suffering of the individual is not too high a price, afforded him no solace and did not reconcile him to the bitterness of life.

I will not laud my strength. I was as weak in my overwhelming sorrow as one might expect of a poor mortal. As long as my wife survived her child, my love for her gave me the strength outwardly to show nothing that might resemble bitterness or despair. When she too was taken from me, there was nothing or no one to force me to a display of cheerfulness and resignation, and for a while I was a crushed, beaten and broken creature, a faded, falling leaf.

But the knowledge, the spiritual, intellectual knowledge, could not forsake me even though all sensibility had been dulled and stifled by excess of grief. As long as we contemplate ourselves with the scientific eye, from the height of our inmost consciousness, so long too there is something that exists above pain, old age and death. He who accurately observes himself in suffering and old age, is thereby exalted above time and sorrow, for that which contemplates is always more and higher than that which is contemplated. And so in the midst of ray wretchedness I knew that gladness and eternal youth dwelt within me through this tiny spark of contemplative power.

I knew and never forgot that the Eternal in which we live does not take anxious account of a little more or less of suffering and does not spare his creatures.

It suffers thousands of seeds to perish in order that one of them may attain perfect growth. I knew that the pain I felt was the after effect of a craving now grown useless and that I should no longer be sensible of it as soon as I considered what had been attained, and desisted from the unessential and unattainable.