What is my soul?
Nothing.
What are we?
We are nothing.
We think we progress wonderfully in the arts and sciences as one century follows another. What does it amount to? It does not teach us the all-why. It does not let us cease to wonder what it is that we are doing, where it is that we are going. It does not teach us why the green comes again to the old, old hills in the spring; why the benign balm-o’-Gilead shines wet and sweet after the rain; why the red never fails to come to the breast of the robin, the black to the crow, the gray to the little wren; why the sand and barrenness lies stretched out around us; why the clouds float high above us; why the moon stands in the sky, night after night; why the mountains and valleys live on as the years pass.
The arts and sciences go on and on—still we wonder. We have not yet ceased to weep. And we suffer still in 1902, even as they suffered in 1802, and in 802.
To-day we eat our good dinners with forks.
A thousand years ago they had no forks.
Yet, though we have forks, we are not happy. We scream and kick and struggle and weep just as they did a thousand years ago—when they had no forks.
We are “no wiser than when Omar fell asleep.”