“She had,” Dare agreed. “If Katie was a savant she might have developed it into an epoch-making theory of time.”
“How far ahead would that have got her?”
“Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely, concrete observations like Katie’s. Conversely the beauty of Katie’s homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton’s apple and adventures of other scientific saints. It’s like art: the glory of music is that it is made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that they can all get to a musical heaven.”
Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and unglazed,—an ocean’s ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.
The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown’s mane came to sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding boots.
“By all that,” she said, “you imply that philosophizing doesn’t get one anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting ahead like a comet.”
“Philosophy isn’t the propeller, it’s the log that records the progress and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent applied mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it doesn’t make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn’t make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God’s evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of still further combinations of remnants . . . The folly of regarding Socrates as sublime and me as ridiculous is that we are one and the same entity, just as those asters are merely a continuation of the first aster seed, which was merely the continuation of a continuation.”
Louise recalled the discussion she had had with her father on the day of Billy’s funeral, when they had agreed to grant cats equal rights with Billy in the matter of immortality. “Would you go so far as to say that Socrates and Sundown were parts of the same entity?” she inquired.
“Even further. I should include the fly that his tail can’t quite reach, the worms under his feet, and the leaves over his head. It’s all in the ocean . . . Stones and mud aren’t as self-assertive as radium, but who is to say that they have no phosphorescent potentialities? If you eat a speck of mud on your celery, doesn’t it, or something chemical in it, become a part of you and take a more distinguished place in the realm of things vital?”
“Then how to account for the fact that we can talk, Sundown can only neigh, and stones can’t even sigh,—even if they are full of sermons.”