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“It has never happened!” cannot be construed to mean, “It can never happen!”—as well say, “Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,” or “Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.”
Some zoologists have even suggested a biological law: that the number of individuals in a species never remains constant, but always rises and falls—the higher the animal and the slower its breeding-rate, the longer its period of fluctuation.
As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.
The horse, suddenly he thought, was like that civilization of which man had been so proud, galloping so hard and yet never arriving anywhere; and sometime destined, when once the power failed, to grow still forever. . . .
Now no longer would Best-of-Breed go for stance, and shape of head, and markings. Now Champion Golden Lad of the Piedmont IV no longer outranked the worst mongrel of the alley. The prize, which was life itself, would go to the one of keenest brain, staunchest limb, and strongest jaw, who could best shape himself to meet the new ways and who in the old competition of the wilderness could win the means of life.
As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nurslings of man.
A fence was a fact, and a fence was also a symbol. Between the herds and the crops, the fence stood as a fact, but between the rye and the oats, it was only a symbol,
“There are no atheists in fox holes,” he remembered, and the whole world now was nothing but a huge fox hole! But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals.
“Now all your victories are in vain.”
They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly.
Destroy the culture-pattern in which people lived, and often the shock was too great for the individuals. Take away family and job, friends and church, all customary amusements and routines, hope too—and life became walking death.
In that generation there will be neither father nor mother, nor wife, nor child, nor friend. But it will be as in the ancient tales when the gods reared up a new people from stones or dragons’ teeth, and they were all strangers with strange faces, and no man knew his fellow’s face.
When any creature reached such climactic numbers and attained such high concentration, a nemesis was likely to fall upon it.
“The lights are going out! The lights are going out!” How often, in how many centuries had those words been said—sometimes in matter-of-fact tones, sometimes in panic—now literally, now as symbol? How much light had meant in all the story of Man! Light of the world! Light of life! Light of knowledge!
Just for a moment, he thought (or imagined), they flared more brightly—and then they were gone. Princess stirred in her sleep, then suddenly barked the half-bark of a dream. Was it a death knell?
He could see no light—not along the streets, nor anywhere on the bridge. This, then, was the end. “Let there be no light, and there was no light!”
“Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment.”
He was on one side; x, perhaps, you could call him; and on the other side was y—everything which was called the world. And two sides of the equation always were trying to keep more or less in balance and never quite managed it. Perhaps the real balance only came with death. (Perhaps that was what Koheleth in his fine disillusioned mind was thinking when he wrote “The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.”)
When the opportunity was at your hand, you did not dare to seize it. When the opportunity was lost, it became precious.
the sitting at the same table, the sharing of the bread and salt.
The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.
Not the Lion, but Man, was the King of Beasts. Throughout his reign the rule was heavy, often harsh.
“It’s better,” he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, “to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him.”
“Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.” Of course, like every other definition of genius, that one could be shot to pieces also, because it obviously included the madman, as well as the genius.
Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard. Heartbeat flutters, knife flashes, horse stumbles, cancer grows, more subtle foes invade. . . . Then they sit around the fire at the cave-mouth, and say, “What shall we do? Now that he is no longer here to lead us!” Or, while the great bell tolls, they gather in the court-yard, and say, “It should not have happened so. Who is there now to give us counsel?” Or they meet at the street corner, and say sadly, “Why did it have to be this way? Now there is no one to take his place.” Through all of history it runs as a plaint. “If the young
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Perhaps there were too many people, too many old ways of thinking, too many books. Perhaps the ruts of thinking had grown too deep and the refuse of the past lay too heavy around us, like piles of garbage and old clothes. Why should not the philosopher welcome the wiping-out of it all and a new start and men playing the game with fresh rules? There would be, perhaps, more gain than loss.
Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.
What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!
he did not believe in astrology, and yet the shifting of the stars showed that the solar system too was changing, and that the earth itself was becoming a more or a less habitable place for man. Thus, at some profounder depth of reality, astrology might be right, and the changes in the sky could be taken as symbol of all the grinding wheels of circumstances. The stars in their courses! What was man, little man, to withstand them?
Then, where there had been three, now there was only one, for Death had gone and she too.
For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.
This is the road that no man finishes traveling. This is the river so long that no voyager finds the sea. This is the path winding among the hills, and still winding. This is the bridge that no man crosses wholly—lucky is he who through the mists and rain-clouds sees, or even believes he dimly sees, the farther shore.
“It is a strange thing,” he thought, “to be an old god. They worship you, and yet they mistreat you. If you do not want to do what they wish, they make you. It is not fair.”
Then, though his sight was now very dim, he looked again at the young men. “They will commit me to the earth,” he thought. “Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”
