THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY
If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I should do, probably, would be to argue a little—ask him what it was for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it might be overdoing things a little.
I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,—people that wanted it or thought they did—I would probably. They would be happier and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this very moment, right here on the premises—Universe, Earth, United States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to an infinite number of things. As for joggling God’s elbow or praying to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul’s eyes, and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel as if I had stopped living forever—to ask Him.
I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great blackness. All things that were—it seemed to my soul, were snuffed out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of light—had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, “Now I will try to realize Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me….” Ties flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping ghostlike past the windows…. Voices of wheels over and under…. The long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops (and which feels like taking gas) … the semi-confidential, semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence, they come to, when the car halts—all these. Finally when I look up every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me. The night is the crowded time to travel—car almost to one’s self, nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company—the long monotone of miles—miles—flying beside me and above and around and beneath—all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to pick out with one’s soul from Darkness. “Here am I,” I said as the roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed through the blackness. “Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of glimmer…. Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and hold me.”
No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man’s immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is living or staying, the universe is his real address.
I have been at sea—lain with a board over me out in the wide night and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of it—the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, “Where art thou?” I looked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and upon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.
A thousand breaths we lie
Shrouded limbs and faces
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