Late Thoughts.

'A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.' SPINOZA. 

 

IT is not death which greatly I fear but the fear of it, the fear of being without hope, without presence of any kind; for it represents the great ignorance, the absence of all that is known, or at least all which is deducibly connected of this world in my thoughts. I must confess that I seem in contradistinction to most, or at least so I gather, not to relish the works of this world very much. Though that is not to say I abhor it, only I am easily wearied and I feel the day to be far spent even at five and twenty. It is supposed that about half of all who have lived in human history did not live beyond thirty; by that standard I am already senile and facing my terminal days, often indeed it feels that way to me. Perhaps this is due to my very complete isolation from the physical and social world around me, a most voluntary isolation, but I cannot recognise the same feelings of physical felicity which I believe I notice in others. I love poetry of nature and certain parts of nature very greatly, especially rain and darkness, trees and stars, but it would be dishonest of me to pretend, if I were offered a choice between a world of thought and a world of experience, that I should choose the world of experience. Almost all physical experience to me is cloyed. I cannot eat sweetmeats without indigestion following, I do not feel exalted in exercise, though I do sometimes feel exalted in a game of exercise, but that I think is due to the thoughts of competition rather than the experience of bodily exertion. It is easier to make a virtue of necessity when an interest is made of virtue (or improvement). Often exercise to me is suffering, but tennis is an interest. The game of itself is compelling, the exercise required in it is secondary. Therefore I will play the game in spite of the exercise it requires and not because of it, so I make an interest of a virtue.

   I love artistic works, music and beautiful painting, but sometimes I wonder whether it is not the thoughts they stir within me that I love instead of the works themselves — such is my egoism. I view the outer world but as a means to move my inner world, the real world to me, so I cannot feel that this outer world is my heaven. Truly I trust that others addicted to life feel it to be theirs and I do not say they are mistaken, only I do not feel these days as they do. For similar reasons I love to read of stories in novels which would be a torment for me to actually live, such as in Dickens, Shakespeare, or Don Quixote, because it is the thoughts in them which I love, not the illusion of the material worlds they construct. Why then seek I after God? Do I desire that the clouds so big with mercy should break with blessings on my head? Do I require after God what an ordinary peasant would wish of his king? If God incarnate appeared this moment in my room, took a seat in my chair, and said to me, 'My dear fellow, I think you have thought, spoken, and acted, wisely in your time, and I know also that you crave, as is natural of the species, wealth, admiration, talent, and beauty: be it all yours.' would I be satisfied? No! I would be pleased, very much pleased, but not satisfied, rather disappointed that my thought of God should be so reduced to a mere genie of my own personal fantasy. I do not expect, and frankly wonder if I ever would want, the kind of character in God that would answer prayer in the most obvious or vulgar of ways. I am well convinced that God would not deliver me from the peril of a disease all others have yielded to, or from any likely terminal mischance. If I were delivered I could not apportion the fact to a godly intercession when I know how many better and more pious souls than mine have begged in vain for God's rescuing grace and intercession. What then do I want from God? Nothing less than the ultimate wealth in existence: the thought of Him. That is what makes life worth living and death worth delaying, though at the same time it leaves enough of want and yearning to wish for something in that very same death of completion or absolution. I feel as though I always am attempting to catch the reflection of God in a shard of glass, which I cannot see when I look to Him directly. If in death I am consumed like a match flame in a sun of glory, if I lose myself by becoming Him, then utterly I desire it without wishing unnaturally to seek it; it will after all come when it comes. Whether I am quenched in oblivion or glory I am quenched all the same, but on the one hand I am reduced to nothing and on the other I am obliterated in creation, made the fuel of celestial fire. My life at the present time is not mine to dispose of however, for we are all shareholders in one another especially in our companions and family. Courage in pain and disease is good and inspiring, suicide is very dispiriting as an example, and seems almost to show more disdain for others than one's self. Above all however, we are at God's disposal and the more we are cognisant of that the closer we are to knowing Him in this ephemeral mode of humanity.

As for causality: Causality as a notion is entirely dependent on locality and comparison of localities, so that without this gridruling it disappears utterly. Let mystics be heartened by this reflection, the scientists ever deal in the disintegrating. They who deny it must face it someday: I know you well if I know you thus.