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The Story Of My Heart: An Autobiography, a non-fiction book by Richard Jefferies |
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Chapter 11 |
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_ CHAPTER XI This our earth produces not only a sufficiency a superabundance, but in one year pours a cornucopia of good things forth, enough to fill us for many years in succession. The only reason we do not enjoy it is the want of rational organisation. I know, of course, and all who think know, that some labour or supervision will always necessary, since the plough must travel the furrow and the seed must must be sown; but I maintain that a tenth, nay, a hundredth, part of the labour and slavery now gone through will be sufficient, and that in the course of time, as organisation perfects itself and discoveries advance, even that part will diminish. For the rise and fall of the tides alone furnish forth sufficient power to do automatically all the labour that is done on the earth. Is ideal man, then, to be idle? I answer that, if so, I see no wrong, but a great good. I deny altogether that idleness is an evil, or that it produces evil, and I am well aware why the interested are so bitter against idleness--namely, because it gives time for thought, and if men had time to think their reign would come to an end. Idleness--that is, the absence of the necessity to work for subsistence--is a great good. I hope succeeding generations will be able to be ideal. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end with all my heart. If employment they must have--and the restlessness of the mind will insure that some will be followed--then they will find scope enough in the perfection of their physical frames, in the expansion of the mind, and in the enlargement of the soul. They shall not work for bread, but for their souls. I am willing to divide and share all I shall ever have for this purpose, though I think the end will rather be gained by organisation than by sharing alone. In these material things, too, I think that we require another circle of ideas, and I believe that such ideas are possible, and, in a manner of speaking, exist. Let me exhort every one to do their utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas. For every idea gained is a hundred years of slavery remitted. Even with the idea of organisation which promises most I am not satisfied, but endeavour to get beyond and outside it, so that the time now necessary may be shortened. Besides which, I see that many of our difficulties arise from obscure and remote causes--obscure like the shape of bones, for whose strange curves there is no familiar term. We must endeavour to understand the crookedness and unfamiliar curves of the conditions of life. Beyond that still there are other ideas. Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible. For my thought is like a hyperbola that continually widens ascending. For grief there is no known consolation. It is useless to fill our hearts with bubbles. A loved one gone is gone, and as to the future--even if there is a future--it is unknown. To assure ourselves otherwise is to soothe the mind with illusions; the bitterness of it is inconsolable. The sentiments of trust chipped out on tombstones are touching instances of the innate goodness of the human heart, which naturally longs for good, and sighs itself to sleep in the hope that, if parted, the parting is for the benefit of those that are gone. But these inscriptions are also awful instances of the deep intellectual darkness which presses still on the minds of men. The least thought erases them. There is no consolation. There is no relief. There is no hope certain; the whole system is a mere illusion. I, who hope so much, and am so rapt up in the soul, know full well that there is no certainty. The tomb cries aloud to us--its dead silence presses on the drum of the ear like thunder, saying, Look at this, and erase your illusions; now know the extreme value of human life; reflect on this and strew human life with flowers; save every hour for the sunshine; let your labour be so ordered that in future times the loved ones may dwell longer with those who love them; open your minds; exalt your souls; widen the sympathies of your hearts; face the things that are now as you will face the reality of death; make joy real now to those you love, and help forward the joy of those yet to be born. Let these facts force the mind and the soul to the increase of thought, and the consequent remission of misery; so that those whose time it is to die may have enjoyed all that is possible in life. Lift up your mind and see now in this bitterness of parting, in this absence of certainty, the fact that there is no directing intelligence; remember that this death is not of old age, which no one living in the world has ever seen; remember that old age is possible, and perhaps even more than old age; and beyond these earthly things-what? None know. But let us, turning away from the illusion of a directing intelligence, look earnestly for something better than a god, seek for something higher than prayer, and lift our souls to be with the more than immortal now. A river runs itself clear during the night, and in sleep thought becomes pellucid. All the hurrying to and fro, the unrest and stress, the agitation and confusion subside. Like a sweet pure spring, thought pours forth to meet the light, and is illumined to its depths. The dawn at my window ever causes a desire for larger thought, the recognition of the light at the moment of waking kindles afresh the wish for a broad day of the mind. There is a certainty that there are yet ideas further, and greater--that there is still a limitless beyond. I know at that moment that there is no limit to the things that may be yet in material and tangible shape besides the immaterial perceptions of the soul. The dim white light of the dawn speaks it. This prophet which has come with its wonders to the bedside of every human being for so many thousands of years faces me once again with the upheld finger of light. Where is the limit to that physical sign? >From space to the sky, from the sky to the hills, and the sea; to every blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between the fir-trees, and particles rise and fall within, and cross it while the air each side seems void. Through the heavens a beam slants, and we are aware of the star-stratum in which our earth moves. But what may be without that stratum? Certainly it is not a void. This light tells us much, but I think in the course of time yet more delicate and subtle mediums than light may be found, and through these we shall see into the shadows of the sky. When will it be possible to be certain that the capacity of a single atom has been exhausted? At any moment some fortunate incident may reveal a fresh power. One by one the powers of light have been unfolded. After thousands of years the telescope opened the stars, the prism analysed the substance of the sun, the microscope showed the minute structure of the rocks and the tissues of living bodies. The winged men on the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the gods of the Nile, the chariot-borne immortals of Olympus, not the greatest of imagined beings ever possessed in fancied attributes one-tenth the power of light. As the swallows twitter, the dim white finger appears at my window full of wonders, such as all the wise men in twelve thousand precedent years never even hoped to conceive. But this is not all--light is not all; light conceals more than it reveals; light is the darkest shadow of the sky; besides light there are many other mediums yet to be explored. For thousands of years the sunbeams poured on the earth, full as now of messages, and light is not a hidden thing to be searched out with difficulty. Full in the faces of men the rays came with their intelligence from the sun when the papyri were painted beside the ancient Nile, but they were not understood. This hour, rays or undulations of more subtle mediums are doubtless pouring on us over the wide earth, unrecognised, and full of messages and intelligence from the unseen. Of these we are this day as ignorant as those who painted the papyri were of light. There is an infinity of knowledge yet to be known, and beyond that an infinity of thought. No mental instrument even has yet been invented by which researches can be carried direct to the object. Whatever has been found has been discovered by fortunate accident; in looking for one thing another has been chanced on. A reasoning process has yet to be invented by which to go straight to the desired end. For now the slightest particle is enough to throw the search aside, and the most minute circumstance sufficient to conceal obvious and brilliantly shining truths. One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear-tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf. At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another. Many men of broad brow and great intellect lived in the days of ancient Greece, but for lack of the accident of a lens, and of knowing the way to use a prism, they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am in exactly the position they were when I look beyond light. Outside my present knowledge I am exactly in their condition. I feel that there are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf. If any one says to himself that the telescope, and the microscope, the prism, and other discoveries have made all plain, then he is in the attitude of those ancient priests who worshipped the scarabaeus or beetle. So, too, it is with thought; outside our present circle of ideas I believe there is an infinity of idea. All this that has been effected with light has been done by bits of glass--mere bits of shaped glass, quickly broken, and made of flint, so that by the rude flint our subtlest ideas are gained. Could we employ the ocean as a lens, and force truth from the sky, even then I think there would be much more beyond. Natural things are known to us only under two conditions--matter and force, or matter and motion. A third, a fourth, a fifth--no one can say how many conditions--may exist in the ultra-stellar space, and such other conditions may equally exist about us now unsuspected. Something which is neither matter nor force is difficult to conceive, yet, I think, it is certain that there are other conditions. When the mind succeeds in entering on a wider series, or circle of ideas, other conditions would appear natural enough. In this effort upwards I claim the assistance of the soul--the mind of the mind. The eye sees, the mind deliberates on what it sees, the soul understands the operation of the mind. Before a bridge is built, or a structure erected, or an interoceanic canal made, there must be a plan, and before a plan the thought in the mind. So that it is correct to say the mind bores tunnels through the mountains, bridges the rivers, and constructs the engines which are the pride of the world. This is a wonderful tool, but it is capable of work yet more wonderful in the exploration of the heavens. Now the soul is the mind of the mind. It can build and construct and look beyond and penetrate space, and create. It is the keenest, the sharpest tool possessed by man. But what would be said if a carpenter about to commence a piece of work examined his tools and deliberately cast away that with the finest edge? Such is the conduct of those who reject the inner mind or psyche altogether. So great is the value of the soul that it seems to me, if the soul lived and received its aspirations it would not matter if the material universe melted away as snow. Many turn aside the instant the soul is mentioned, and I sympathise with them in one sense; they fear lest, if they acknowledge it, they will be fettered by mediaeval conditions. My contention is that the restrictions of the mediaeval era should entirely be cast into oblivion, but the soul recognised and employed. Instead of slurring over the soul, I desire to see it at its highest perfection. _ |
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