Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets—namely, the forgetter’s self. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always move away to a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to speak under my nose.
Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?
But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!”
Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.
I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.
And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes.”
The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.
I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.
I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to be death and the future itself.”
In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the ignes fatui and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.