But the supreme moments of human consciousness, when the
apex-thought of the complex vision is shooting its arrows of flame
into the darkness, are but slightly concerned with the demonic
sub-human life of hypothetical elemental personalities. They are
concerned with the large, deep, magical spectacle of the great
cosmic drama as it unrolls itself in infinite perspective. They are
concerned with the unfathomable struggle, more terrible, more
beautiful, more real, than anything else in life, between the
resistant power of malice and the creative power of love. Nor do
they see, these moments, the end of this long drama. The soul
creates and is baffled in its creations. The soul loves and is baffled
in its loving. Good and evil grow strangely mingled as they
wrestle in the bottomless abyss. And ever, above us and beneath
us, the same immense space spreads out its encircling arms. And
ever, out of the invisible, the beckoning of immortal beauty leads
us forward. Pain turns into pleasure; and pleasure turns into pain.
Misery, deep as the world, troubles the roots of our being.
Happiness, deep as the world, floods us with a flood like the
waves of the ocean. All our philosophy is like the holding up of a
little candle against a great wind. Soon, soon the candle is blown
out: and the immense Perhaps rolls its waters above our heads.
The aboriginal malice against which the Gods struggle is never
overcome. But who can resist asking the question--supposing that
drama once ended, that eternal duality once reconciled, would
annihilation be the last word or would something else, something
undreamed of, something unguessed at, something "impossible,"
irrational, contrary to every philosophy that has ever sprung from
the human brain, take the place of what we call life and substitute
some new organ of research for the vision which we have called
complex?
Who can say? The world is still young and the immortal Gods are
still young; and our business at present is with life rather than
beyond-life. Confused and difficult are the ways of our mortality;
and after much philosophizing we seem to be only more conscious
than ever that the secret of the world is in something else than
wisdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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