Chapter 5 - Page 2

prophetical management of
the meteorological office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot
be captured by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely that
the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than
that I should turn into a writer of tales.

To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating
pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied,
the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of
unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking
here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded
conceit--who really never rest in this world, and when out of it go
on fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I
thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some
aim of aggrandizement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal
glance upon them selves.

And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together with
the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate
beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has
put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness," miss,
perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the
abode of conflicting opinions. The ethical view of the universe involves
us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last
vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready
to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot
be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you
like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for despair! Those
visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest
is our affair--the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation,
the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of
a subtle mind--that's our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful
attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our
consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth--a task in which
fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted
with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the
haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to
the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.

Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every religion
except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and cloak of arid
despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every