Nothing, save for the moment! In the moment exists all the past and the future! Evolution—! Anti-peristalsis. Eighty-seven years ago I was born in a little village in the outskirts of Birmingham. The past is for those that lived in the past, the present is for today. Or—today! The little thing lay at the foot of the bed while the midwife—It was in England 1833. And now by the sea a new world death has come and left his chewing gum in an artery of her brain. But I'll pay you for this, she said as they were sliding her into the ambulance, I'll pay you for this. You young people think you are awfully smart, don't you. I don't want to see them again, those fuzzy things, what are they, trees?
Good gracious, do you call this making me comfortable? The two boys had her on the stretcher on the floor. Yes, stay here a week then I can do what I please but you want to do what you please first. I wonder how much she planned.
[CHAPTER XVI]
Another day, going evening foremost this time. Leaning above her baby in the carriage was Nettie Vogelman, grown heavier since we knew her in the sixth grade twenty-five years before and balancing great masses of prehistoric knowledge on her head in the shape of a purple ostrichplume hat.
But where is romance in all this—with the great-coat she was wearing hanging from the bulge of her paps to the sidewalk? Romance! When knighthood was in flower. Rome. Eliogabalus in a skirt married his man servant.
We struggle to comprehend an obscure evolution—opposed by the true and static church—when the compensatory involution so plainly marked escapes our notice. Living we fail to live but insist on impaling ourselves on fossil horns. But the church balanced like a glass ball where the jets of evolution and involution meet has always, in its prosperous periods, patronised the arts. What else could it do? Religion is the shell of beauty.
The fad of evolution is swept aside. It was only mildly interesting at the best. I'll give you a dollar my son for each of these books you read: Descent of Man and Origin of Species, reprinted by Dombie and Sons, Noodle Lane, Ken. W. London; England 1890.
Who will write the natural history of involution beginning with the stone razor age in Cornwall to the stone razor age in Papua? Oh China, China teach us! Ottoman, Magyar, Moor, teach us. Norse Eric the Discoverer teach us. Cœur de Lion, teach us. Great Catherine teach us. Phryne, Thaïs, Cleopatra, Brunehilde, Lucretia Borgia teach us. What was it, Demosthenes, that she said to you? Come again?
Borne on the foamy crest of involution, like Venus on her wave, stript as she but of all consequence—since it is the return: See they return! From savages in quest of a bear we are come upon rifles, cannon. From Chaldeans solving the stars we have fallen into the bellies of the telescopes. From great runners we have evolved into speeches sent over a wire.