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Page 1 of 11929 · PDF PAGE 40
…ent, and was working furiously against time. I am going to die. The consolation of death is Religion. There is no use for Religion in life. How many atheists have I not known sign the arti- cles the sake of fellowships and livings! Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific or a sham and a swindle. I was brought up a Presbyterian How easily I drifted into the English Church! And now where is God? Where is the Lamb of God? Where is the Saviour? Where is the Comforter? Why was I not saved from that devil? Is he going to e…
1929 · PDF PAGE 51
… the gases of the body, combined and recombined, flamed off, free from organic form. Where was Arthur? His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly de- stroyed. As separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness. And I heard this utterance: or rather this is my translation into English of a single thought whose syn- thesis is Woe. Substance is called spirit or matter. Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, inde- structible. Infinite and eternal change! Infinite and eternal pain! No absolute: no truth, no…
1929 · PDF PAGE 54
… that all painful or depressing emotions seem to lengthen time; pleasant thoughts and exalted moods make time fly. Thus, in summing up a life from an outside standpoint, it would seem that, supposing pleasure and pain to have occupied equal periods, the impression would be that pain was enormously greater than pleasure. This may be controverted. Virgil writes: Fortisan haec olim memi- nisse juvabit, and there is at least one modern writer thoroughly conversant with pessimism who is very opti- mistic. But the new facts which I here submit over…
1929 · PDF PAGE 28
…. Not only the past hope, but all future hope, was annihilated. It was during my convalescence that the most re- markable incident of my life took place. I was in great pain one afternoon, and wished to see the doctor. The nurse went to the study to tele- phone for him. Nurse! I said, as she returned, don't lie to me. He's not gone to Royston; he's got cancer, and is too upset to come. Whatever next? said the nurse. It's right he cant come, and I was going to tell you he had gone to Roys- ton; but I never heard nothing about no cancer.
1929 · PDF PAGE 39
life; the alternation was but systole and diastole, the throb of his envenomed pulse, the reflection in con- sciousness of his blood-beat. I became conscious of his intense longing for death to end the torture. The blood circulated ever slower and more painfully; I could feel him hoping for the end. This dreadful rose-dawn suddenly greyed and sick- ened with doubt. Hope sank to its nadir; fear rose like a dragon, with leaden wings. Suppose, thought he, that after all death does not end me! I cannot express this conception. It is not that the he…
1929 · PDF PAGE 27
…; we were married during the May week, and went immediately to Switzer- land. I beg to be spared any recital of so sacred a period of my life: but I must record one fact. We were sitting in a garden by Lago Maggiore after a delightful tramp from Chamounix over the Col du Ge- ant to Courmayeur, and thence to Aosta, and so by de- grees to Pallanza. Arthur rose, apparently struck by some idea, and began to walk up and down the terrace. I was quite suddenly impelled to turn my head to assure myself of his presence. This may seem nothing to you who …
1929 · PDF PAGE 52
…. There is just the possibility that if all thinking minds, all spiritual beings, were thus de- stroyed, and especially if all organic life could be annihi- lated, that the Universe might cease to be, since (as Bishop Berkeley has shown) it can only exist in some thinking mind. And there is really no evidence (in spite of Berkeley) for the existence of any extra-human con- sciousness. Matter in itself may think, in a sense, but its monotony of woe is less awful than its abomination, the building up of high and holy things only to drag them th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 47
…s. Here was the overwhelming truth; in death man lives again, and lives for ever. Yet we might have thought of it; the phantasmagoria of life which throng the mind of a drowning man might have suggested something of the sort to any man with a sympathetic and active imagination. Worse even than the thoughts themselves was the apprehension of the thoughts ere they arose. Carbun- cles, boils, ulcers, cancers, there is no equivalent for these pustules of the bowels of hell, into whose seething convolutions Arthur sank deeper, ever deeper. The magni…
1929 · PDF PAGE 20
…asty filth about free love or something, isn't it?) Theodore Bugg was not a sensitive man; excess of intuitive sympathy had not made his life a hell; but he felt that his domestic relations were strained. Especially since that Mrs. Grahame had evinced a liking for Gertrude. Her husband's colonelcy was the gilding of the pill; but the pill was a bitter one, for Mrs. Grahame went motoring and even golfing on Sunday instead of going to Church, and once or twice had taken Gertrude with her, to the scandal of the neighbourhood. Colonel Grahame, to…
1929 · PDF PAGE 42
…hur; it hung over him like a threat, while the intensification of that consciousness, its libera- tion from the sense of time natural to life, caused each act of the demon to appear of vast duration, although the intervals between the howls of the body on the bed were very short. Each pang of torture or suspense was born, rose to its crest, and died to be reborn again through what seemed countless aeons. Still more was this the case in the process of his as- similation by the demon. The coma of the dying man was a phenomenon altogether out of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 21
…e Gertie! There was a silence. Excuse me, father, said the girl at last, but I've just had a glimpse of you for the first time in my life, and it's a bit of a shock. I must think. And she stood motionless until her hapless father at- tracted her attention by backing into his wicker chair. Don't touch holy things, she snapped suddenly, taking the sketch from his nerveless hand, and replacing it rev- erently in the portfolio. The action seemed to decide her.
1929 · PDF PAGE 6
…er of these matters. Well, sir, to my story! Among the convicts there was one universal pleasure, a pleasure that could cease only with life or with the empire of the reason, a pleas-