And lives on earth, must close his ears
To many voices that he hears."
The "many voices" are stilled; one has left them at least seventy-five miles away,—in Gallup, for instance! Gallup, that for the time prefigures itself to him as his New York, his Paris, his London. It is the source of all his possible supplies; and that it does not assume an overwhelming importance is simply because he does not want any supplies of the particular nature that Gallup—or Paris—can furnish. He has achieved something more than the power to satisfy all his (former) multitudinous wants; he has eliminated them.
To be sure, the Chinese have a proverb that it is not worth while to cut off one's feet to save buying shoes. Yet, if instead of depriving himself of feet he has achieved wings, why, manifestly, there is no need of shoes. There are, when one comes to think of it, a vast number of things in our late civilization for which there is no special need.
"For a cap and bells our lives we pay;
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking:
'Tis heaven alone that is given away;
'Tis only God may be had for the asking."
In fact, when one comes to reflect upon the aspects of his former life (as he sees them in mental panorama from Adamana), he can only arrive at the conclusion that life is unnecessarily choked and submerged under an ever-increasing burden of things. Emerson, of course, whose insight saw the universe as a crystal sphere which revealed to his vision its entire working mechanism,—Emerson long since announced that
"Things are in the saddle