The Dead and the Living - Page 2

a like mood feels that he is in a heavenly place and
is a native there, one with it.

Another less obvious cause of my feeling is that the love of our kind
cannot exist, or at all events not unmixed with contempt and various
other unpleasant ingredients, in people who live and have their being
amidst thousands and millions of their fellow-creatures herded
together. The great thoroughfares in which we walk are peopled with an
endless procession, an innumerable multitude; we hardly see and do not
look at or notice them, knowing beforehand that we do not know and
never will know them to our dying day; from long use we have almost
ceased to regard them as fellow-beings.

I recall here a tradition of the Incas, which tells that in the
beginning a benevolent god created men on the slopes of the Andes, and
that after a time another god, who was at enmity with the first,
spitefully transformed them into insects. Here we have a contrary
effect--it is the insects which have been transformed; the millions of
wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest
have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they are
still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their
ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the
street, one of the swarming multitude, you are in but not of it. You
are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike
them as a man is unlike an ant, and the love and sympathy you feel
towards them is about equal to that which you experience when looking
down on the swarm in a wood-ants' nest.

Undoubtedly when I am in the crowd, poisoned by contact with the crowd-
mind--the formic acid of the spirits--I am not actually or keenly
conscious of the great gulf between me and the others, but, as in the
former case, the sense of relief is experienced here too in escaping
from it. The people of the small rustic community have not been de-
humanised. I am a stranger, and they do not meet me with blank faces
and pass on in ant-like silence. So great is the revulsion that I look
on them as of my kin, and am so delighted to be with them again after
an absence of centuries, that I want to embrace and kiss them all. I am
one of them, a villager with the village mind, and no wish for any
other.

This mind or heart includes the dead as well as the living, and the
church and churchyard is the central spot and half-way house or
camping-ground between this and the other world, where dead and living
meet and hold communion--a fact that is unknown to or ignored by
persons of the "better class," the parish priest or vicar sometimes
included.

And as I have for the nonce taken on the village mind, I am