Packed in cases
In our named and numbered places,
Catalogued for sleep,
Trembling through the Godlight
Below, above,
Deep to Deep.
How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about another—how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if it were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion—is a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have wasted in this one, worrying about it.
Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as unimportant in it as I look—or that I could be if I tried? that I am a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe … with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it. I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me—to the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit, would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or not,—takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of space or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and petering along over a long, narrow row of years?
Thousands of things are happening that are mine—out, around, and through the great darkness—being born and killed and ticked and printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam I say, “There is my omnipresence.” My being is busy out in the universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.