CHAPTER XV
The shadows of the September afternoon were
lengthening toward us from the Round Pond by the time O'Malley reached this
stage of his curious and fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and
the "wupsey-up, wupsey-down" babies, as he termed them, had long
since gone in to their teas, or whatever it is that London babies take at six
o'clock.
We strolled home together, and he welcomed the
idea of sharing a dinner we should cook ourselves in the tiny Knightsbridge
flat. "Stewpot evenings," he called these occasions. They reminded us
of camping trips together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like
room the "stew" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on
the skirts of the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming
tent, and the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves.
Passing that grotesque erection opposite the
Albert Hall, gaudy in the last touch of sunset, I saw him shudder. The spell of
the ship and sea and the blazing Sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, Etna's
cones towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry Memorial. I stole a
glance at my companion. His light blue eyes shone, but with the reflection of
another sunset--the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off scenes when the world
was young.
His personality held something of magic in that
silent stroll homewards, for no word fell from either one of us to break its
charm. The untidy hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his
faded coat of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings
beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his ears, and how the upper
points of them ran so sharply into the hair. His walk was springy, light, very
quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden running jump would
land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy covert where ferns grew. There
was a certain fling of the shoulders that had an air of rejecting streets and
houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet, caught me of a faun passing down through
underbrush of woodland glades to drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving
back to me a little verse of Alice Corbin's, I turned and murmured it while
watching him:
What dim Arcadian pastures: Have I known,
That suddenly, out of nothing,
A wind is
blown,
Lifting a veil and a darkness,
Showing a
purple sea--
And under your hair, the faun's eyes
Look out on
me?
It was, of course, that whereas his body marched
along Hill Street and through Montpelier Square, his thoughts and spirit
flitted through the haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. I thought of
the morrow--of my desk in the Life Insurance Office, of the clerks with oiled
hair brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned
up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of cheap
cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names of horses! A
Life Insurance Office! All London paying yearly sums to protect themselves
against--against the most interesting moment of life. Premiums upon escape and
freedom!
Again, it was the spell of my companion's
personality that turned all this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence
into the counters in some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of
course, it would all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere
poetic fancy. But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it magnificent.
And the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot
was empty and we were smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the
prison-house--for he always begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat
beneath the stars and against the grimy chimney-pots--that talk I shall never
forget. Life became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale
this world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I
caught at least some touch of reality--of awful reality--in the idea that this
splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from tiny cells,
might be the body of a glorious Being--the mighty frame to which some immense
Collective Consciousness, vaster than that of men, and wholly different in
kind, might be attached.
In the story, as I found it later in the dusty
little Paddington room, O'Malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me,
the excerpts chosen by Dr. Stahl. As an imaginative essay, they were
interesting, of course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such
as this they overweight the barque of fancy. Yet, in order to appreciate what
followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of his
ideas. The reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to soar
unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section; but to be
faithful to the scaffolding whereon this Irishman built his amazing dream, I must
attempt as best I can some précis of that conversation.
CHAPTER XVI
"Every
fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as part in some
organism unlike our bodies.... As to that which can, and that which cannot,
play the part of an organism, we know very little. A sameness greater or less
with our own bodies is the basis from which we conclude to other bodies and
souls.... A certain likeness of outward form, and again some amount of
similarity in action, are what we stand on when we argue to psychical life. But
our failure, on the other side, to discover these symptoms is no sufficient
warrant for positive denial. It is natural in this connection to refer to
Fechner's vigorous advocacy."
--F.H.
BRADLEY, Appearance and Reality
It was with an innate resistance--at least a
stubborn prejudice--that I heard him begin. The earth, of course, was but a
bubble of dried fire, a huge round clod, dead as mutton. How could it be, in
any permissible sense of the word--alive?
Then, gradually, as he talked there among the
chimney-pots of old smoky London, there stole over me this new and disquieting
sense of reality--a strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with
comfort. Laughter fled away, ashamed. A new beauty, as of some amazing dawn,
flashed and broke upon the world. The autumn sky overhead, thick-sown with its
myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my life's dull ways.
That desk in the Insurance Office of Cornhill gleamed beyond as an altar or a
possible throne.
The glory of Fechner's immense speculation flamed
about us both, majestic yet divinely simple. Only a dim suggestion of it, of
course, lay caught in the words the Irishman used--words, as I found later, that
were a mixture of Professor James and Dr. Stahl, flavored strongly with Terence
O'Malley--but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since and to
have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the commonest things of
daily existence. Mountains, seas, wide landscapes, forests,--all I see now with
emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown to me before. Flowers, rain, wind,
even a London fog, have come to hold new meanings.
I never realized before that the mere size of our
old planet could have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere
quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of
her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of
consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which
it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses, persuade
itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly a
"heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world"
that carried them obstructing their perception of its Life.
And Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer,
playing with a huge poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic
University, he found time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study
electrical science with the result that his measurements in galvanism are
classic to this day. His philosophical work was more than considerable. "A
book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and
experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider
Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these
books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental æsthetics,
in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid the foundations
of a new science," are among his other performances.... "All Leipsic
mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal German scholar,
as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest,
genial, laborious slave to truth and learning.... His mind was indeed one of
those multitudinously organized crossroads of truth which are occupied only at
rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or
too near to be seen in due perspective. Patientest observation, exactest
mathematics, shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on
the largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a
philosopher in the 'great' sense."
"Yes," said O'Malley softly in my ear as
we leaned against the chimneys and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars,
"and it was this man's imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and
bowled him over. I never fathomed the doctor quite. His critical and
imaginative apparatus got a bit mixed up, I suspect, for one moment he cursed
me for asking 'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me
for boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. He never gave
himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that Hospital place
too hot to hold him. He was a wonderful bird. But every time I aimed at him I
shot wide and hit a cloud. Meantime he peppered me all over--one minute urging
me into closer intimacy with my Russian--his cosmic being, his Urmensch type--so
that he might study my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost
apparently to protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced." His
laugh rang out over the roofs.
"The net result," he added, his face
tilted toward the stars as though he said it to the open sky rather than to me,
"was that he pushed me forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever
brought to me. I believe, I verily believe that sometimes, there were moments
of unconsciousness--semi-consciousness perhaps--when I really did leave my
body--caught away as Moses, or was it Job or Paul?--into a Third Heaven, where
I touched a bit of Reality that fairly made me reel with happiness and
wonder."
"Well, but Fechner--and his great idea?"
I brought him back.
He tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden
that fringed the Park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame.
"Is simply this," he replied,
"--'that not alone the earth but the whole Universe in its different spans
and wave-lengths, is everywhere alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual
as the rule in Nature, not the exception. The professorial philosophers have no
vision. Fechner towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He
made discoveries--whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!"
"To which the scholars and professors of
today," I suggested, "would think reply not even called for?"
"Ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced
Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long
words! Perhaps! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of
spiritual being between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the
vaster orders of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats
her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to
their saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth
as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a
tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are parts of her
bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware only of our
separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic consciousness are rare.
They come with love, sometimes with pain, music may bring them too, but above
all--landscape and the beauty of Nature! Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic
to welcome them, clinging for dear life to their precious
individualities."
He drew breath and then went on: "'Fechner
likens our individual persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul,
adding to her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our
perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge. When one
of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive
contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"
"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he
was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from James that he had since pondered
over till they had become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and
very splendid."
"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick
enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is--to understand that
Fechner does not regard the Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at
all, she is a being utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she
is in structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from
any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of our
insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to
a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as that of the earth! The
heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life--a
vaster order of intelligence altogether. A little two-legged man with his
cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain as the apex of attainment he
ridicules. D'ye see, now?"
I gasped, I lit a big pipe--and listened. He went
on. This time it was clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had
mentioned--the one in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's
aim and scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable
injustice by summarizing and abridging him."
"Ages ago the earth was called an
animal," I ventured. "We all know that."
"But Fechner," he replied, "insists
that a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal--'a being
whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.'"
"An inhabitant of the ether--?"
"You've hit it," he replied eagerly.
"Every element has its own living denizens. Ether, then, also has
hers--the globes. 'The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her
denizens--higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins,
flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual
force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the
slightest pull of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us.
Any imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. It is
old as the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually
true."
"This superiority, though?" I queried.
"I should have guessed their stage of development lower than ours, rather
than higher."
"Different," he answered,
"different. That's the point."
"Ah!" I watched a shooting star dive
across our thick, wet atmosphere, and caught myself wondering whether the flash
and heat of that hurrying little visitor produced any reaction in this
Collective Consciousness of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and
upon which later it would fall in finest dust.
"It is by insisting on the differences as
well as on the resemblances," rushed on the excited O'Malley, "that
he makes the picture of the earth's life so concrete. Think a moment. For
instance, our animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of
moving to and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only
our defect."
"Defect!" I cried. "But we're so
proud of it!"
'"What are our legs,'" he laughed,
"'but crutches, by means of which, with restless efforts, we go hunting
after the things we have not inside ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple;
why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully
pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing
to reach for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds
her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her
animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell
the flowers she grows?'"
"We are literally a part of her,
then--projections of her immense life, as it were--one of the projections, at
least?"
"Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part
of the earth," he continued, taking up my thought at once, "so are
our organs her organs. 'She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole
extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'"
He stood up beside me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees
and paths of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked
and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as the idea
of this German's towering imagination possessed him.
"'She brings forth living beings of countless
kinds upon her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each
other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.'"
He leaned over the parapet and drew me to his
side. I stared with him at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking
of the glow and heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic
strivings of its millions for success--money, power, fame, a few, here and there,
for spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night
in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world; of its
villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild creatures in
forest, plain, and mountain...
"All this she takes up into her great heart
as part of herself!" I murmured.
"All this," he replied softly, as the
sound of the Band beyond the Serpentine floated over to us on our roof;
"--the separate little consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes,
all the nations of men, animals, flowers, insects--everything." He again
opened his arms to the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew
glistened on the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow
moon rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on the
air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted
them--subconsciously.
"And all our subconscious sensations are also
hers," he added, catching my thought again; "our dreams but half
divined, our aspirations half confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and
our--prayers."
At the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two
minds joined, each knowing the currents of the other's thought, and both caught
up, gathered ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness
far bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what he
urged--a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was
amazingly uplifting.
"Every form of life, then, is of
importance," I heard myself thinking, or saying, for I hardly knew which.
"The tiniest efforts of value--even the unrecognized ones, and those that
seem futile."
"Even the failures," he whispered,
"--the moments when we do not trust her."
We stood for some moments in silence. Presently,
with a hand upon my shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the
chimney-stack.
"And there are some of us," he said
gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, "who
know a more intimate relationship with their great Mother than the rest,
perhaps. By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of
soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they
lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of
her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material
gain--to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'--primitive children of her
potent youth ... offspring of pure passion ... each individual conscious of her
weight and drive behind him--" His words faded away into a whisper that
became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought somehow continued itself
in my own mind.
"The simple life," I said in a low tone;
"the Call of the Wild, raised to its highest power?"
But he changed my sentence a little.
"The call," he answered, without turning
to look at me, speaking it into the night about us, "the call to
childhood, the true, pure, vital childhood of the Earth--the Golden Age--before
men tasted of the Tree and knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb
lay down together and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that
is, of which such phrases can be symbolical."
"And of which there may be here and there
some fearful exquisite survival?" I suggested, remembering Stahl's words.
His eyes shone with the fire of his passion.
"Of which on that little tourist steamer I found one!"
The wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across
the arid wastes of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the
mountains and gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond
recovery....
"The Hebrew poets called it Before the
Fall," he went on, "and later poets the Golden Age; today it shines
through phrases like the Land of Heart's Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise,
and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as
union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart,
that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the
doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer
form is the reality and riot the inner thought...."
The hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men
floated to us from the pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the
opening of Sloane Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors,
and pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in their
brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The night-life of
the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the stream of souls all hurrying
by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose
themselves--to forget the pressure of the bars that held them--to escape the
fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of
happiness! All so sure they knew the way--yet hurrying really in the wrong
direction--outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be--simple....
We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither
of us found anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder
indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat
he temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O'Malley begged me
to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We sat by
the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it
was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.
CHAPTER XVII
Some of Fechner's reasons for thinking the Earth a
being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage
that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German's joy
in dwelling upon her perfections--later, too, of his first simple vision.
Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of
the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy
Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with
the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary
time of work and duty.
"'To carry her precious freight through the
hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers--being as it is
horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball,
sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting
the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of
her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow
glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own
mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible
in her all at once--all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or
wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That
landscape is her face--a peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in
it like diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the
blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her
veil--a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her
ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.'
"She needs, as a sentient organism," he
continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, "no
heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is--different. 'Their functions she
performs through us! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only
objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by
the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more
exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights
of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous
lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors.... Men have always made fables about angels,
dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between
ourselves and God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between
God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of
angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures
there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches
over all our interests combined.'
"And then," whispered the Irishman,
seeing that I still eagerly listened, "give your ear to one of his moments
of direct vision. Note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:
"'On a certain spring morning I went out to
walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was
rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her
existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not
only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel,
an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the
skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to
Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself
how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to
deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in
the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them nowhere.'"
Fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger
through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the
men drowned his last words....
Life became very wonderful inside those tight,
confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the
heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing--a shilling, it
succeeded in the sense of believing--a symphony. The invading beauty swept
about us both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any
but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan
the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy,
nor deaden effort.
"Come," said O'Malley softly,
interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, "let us walk together through
the Park to your place. It is late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the
morning ... earlier than I."
And presently we passed the statue of Achilles and
got our feet upon the turf beyond--a little bit of living planet in the middle
of the heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the
awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed
toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge Body--the
physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient, conscious.
Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked ... a
Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and--loved us as a mother
her own offspring.... "To whom men could pray as they pray to their
saints."
The conception, even thus dimly and confusedly
adumbrated, brought a new sense of life--terrific and eternal. All living
things upon the earth's surface were emanations of her mighty central soul;
all--from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women
of Today who have forgotten it.
The gods--!
Were these then projections of her personality--aspects
and facets of her divided self--emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did
they still exist as moods or Powers--true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest?
Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?
Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on
Fechner?
Everything about us seemed to draw together into
an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep
of open park--the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very gods
survived--Pan, the eternal and the splendid ... a mood of the Earth-life, a
projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the
night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.
And the others were not so very far behind--those
other little parcels of Earth's Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the
simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and
labeled "gods" ... and worshipped ... so as to draw their powers into
themselves by ecstasy and vision ...
Could, then, worship now still recall them? Was
the attitude of even one true worshipper's heart the force necessary to touch
that particular aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call
forth those ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea--the idea of
"the gods"--was thus forever true and vital...? And might they be
known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?
I only know that as we walked home past the doors
of that dingy Paddington house where Terence O'Malley kept his dusty books and
papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my
mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I have forgotten,
or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. Yet, I hear them
singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes
'twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory
comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. The Earth can heal and
bless.
