In the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. ‘Judgment Day’ is preposterous and evilly crude: there’s no judgment till each can judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep of the dead-- --the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is Restful-- And the thought is Restful. I imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it. Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the days and nights and circling horizons--those above my grave. And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin Resting. --might we lie like that--Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages-- Year after long year, Resting. _Stickily mad_ To-morrow It is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine! Here I happen on a damn in me which is not desultory but bloodily strong and alive and alone. The wood in my blue-white room has been newly painted. For a day and a night I intermittently encounter and go to bed in a spirit of Turpentine. It bears a cruel obscure abortive message to my nerves. I lie wakeful in the dark and try to reason out a logicalness or poetry in a thing so artfully pestilential. But I am hysterically lost in it and my heart beats hysterically in it. I remember the inexpressible ingenuity of man: of white man as against bone-brained savage races. Every invented usefulness feels like divine witchcraft. A pen and a bottle of perfume and a door-knob and a granite kettle and an electric light: I have the use of each since white man is so ingenious. Were I a red Indian I should have only the awkward barbarous stupid tools my race had used a thousand years. I contrast the two as I lie wakeful, with a sense of richness and of detailed repletion and of material blestness. But at once comes the Smell of Turpentine and announces itself something outside that and _different_, something stronger, something masterfuler than ingenuity and savagery together. It tortures my nerves: it burns my eyes: it lames my flesh: it jerks and flays and garbles my inner body. The ingenuity of man has produced opium and cocaine which would combat and hide it all behind a heavy curtain of stupor, with effects equally damaging if less grievously subtle. The Smell of Turpentine is a thing to bear since all its counter-things bring only solider evil.