127
"Oh what misery!
birth incessantly!"
as Buddha said.
One goes on from
day to day with
a Httle of this and
a little of that,
a
few kind
thoughts
and
a
few unkind
thoughts;
nothing
really gets
done.
Body and mind
are changed,
changed
beyond
recall
by nightfall.
But what meafiing has any of this change?
How few there are who can look back through
the years and
say that
they have
made advance
in any definite
direction?
And in how few is
tliat
change,
such
as
it
is,
a
variable
with
intelligence
and
conscious
volition!
The
dead
weight
of the original conditions under
which
we
were born
has counted
for far more
than
all
our
striving.
The uncon-
scious
forces are incomparably
greater than those of which
we have any
knowledge.
This
is
the solidity of our Pantacle,
the Karma of our earth
that whirls
us will he nill he around
her axis at the
rate of
a
thousand
miles an hour.
And
a
thousand
is
Aleph,
a
capital Aleph, the microcosm
of all-wandering
air, the
fool
of the Taro, the aimlessness
and fatality
of things!
It
is
very difficult
then in any way io fashion this heavy
Pantacle.
We
can
engrave
characters
upon
it
with
the
dagger,
but
they will
scarcely
come
to
more
than
did
the
statue of
Ozymandias,
King
of
Kings, in the midst of the unending
desert.
We cut
a
figure on the ice
;
it
is
effaced in
a
morning
by the tracks of
other
skaters;
nor did that
figure
do
more
than
scratch
the surface of