Yet I recovered. I could feel each day the growth of a strange new vigor
in my limbs, a vast force that was something tangibly expressive to
eternal life. Slowly my anguish began to die. After a week more, I began
to understand how my emotions were leaving me, how love and beauty and
everything of which poetry was made--how all this was going. I could not
bear the thought at first. I would look at the golden sunlight and the
blue shadow of the wind, and I would say,
"God! How beautiful!" And the words would echo meaninglessly in my ears.
Or I would remember Alice's face, that face I had once loved so
inextinguishably, and I would weep and clutch my forehead, and clench my
fists, crying,
"O God, how can I live without her!" Yet there would be a little strange
fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,
"Who is this Alice? You know no such person." And truly I would wonder
whether she had ever existed.
So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joy
in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly
with mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the same
fashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. I would
look at everything with new, seeing eyes, new perception, and I would
understand things I had never understood before, because formerly my
emotions had always occupied me more than my thoughts.
And so the weeks went by, until, one day, I was well.
... What, after all, is the use of this chronicle? Surely there will
never be men to read it. I have heard them say that the snow will never
go. I will be buried, it will be buried with me; and it will be the end
of us both. Yet, somehow, it eases my weary soul a little to write....
Need I say that I lived, thereafter, many thousands of thousands of
years, until this day? I cannot detail that life. It is a long round of
new, fantastic impressions, coming dream-like, one after another,
melting into each other. In looking back, as in looking back upon
dreams, I seem to recall only a few isolated periods clearly; and it
seems that my imagination must have filled in the swift movement between
episodes. I think now, of necessity, in terms of centuries and
millenniums, rather than days and months.... The snow blows terribly
about my little fire, and I know it will soon gather courage to quench
us both ...
* * * * *
Years passed, at first with a sort of clear wonder. I watched things
that took place everywhere in the world. I studied. The other students
were much amazed to see me, a man of thirty odd, coming back to college.
"But Judas, Dennell, you've already got your Ph.D! What more do you
want?" So they would all ask me. And I would reply;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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