My first sensation, for I can find no better word to express my thought, was that of freedom, and with that sense of freedom came a consciousness of utter loneliness. I felt as the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's immortal poem must have felt:
"Alone, alone, all alone,
Alone on a wild, wide sea,
So lonely it was that God Himself,
Scarce seemèd there to be."
I felt no pain, no weariness, and I was free; but I was alone.
I do not know that I felt fear; no terror possessed me; I did not think of my past life with dread, neither did past scenes haunt me. My thought of the past was rather the thought of emptiness, of purposelessness, of vacancy; it seemed to me as though my life had been a great opportunity of which I had failed to avail myself.
I had a feeling, too, that it was very cold. I seemed to be floating in infinite space, through sunless air.
Kipling, I remember, in one of the most vivid poems he ever wrote, described a man who, when he died, was carried far away:
"Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford, the roar of the Milky Way.
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down, and drone and cease....
Then Tomlinson looked up and down, and little gain was there For the naked stars gleamed overhead, and he saw that his soul was bare. But the wind that blows between the worlds had cut him like a knife...."
But the poet's imagination never saw in his vision an experience like mine. No winds blew between the worlds; there was no roar as of a rain-fed ford; all was silence. Not the silence of narrow spaces, not even the silence of night, when the ears of listeners are filled with noise made by silence; it was the silence of illimitable spaces, the silence of eternity.
I thought my spirit was mounting; at least that was the impression left upon me; I was going upward, not downward. But here words fail me again, because, as it seemed to me, there was no upward and no downward. More than that, there seemed to be a lack of standards whereby one could measure anything. There was no more time, and as a consequence there was no past, no present, no future. Everything, as I thought, was formless, meaningless.