第69章 CHAPTER XXXVI(2)
You cannot combat me.They say I make for death.What of it?It is truth.Life lies in order to live.Life is a perpetual lie-telling process.Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux,wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow,chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken.Appearances are ghosts.Life is ghost land,where appearances change,transfuse,permeate each the other and all the others,that are,that are not,that always flicker,fade,and pass,only to come again as new appearances,as other appearances.You are such an appearance,composed of countless appearances out of the past.All an appearance can know is mirage.You know mirages of desire.These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past,and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future.
Life is apparitional,and passes.You are an apparition.Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you,you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire,and gibbering you will pass on,interfusing,permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you."And of course it is all unanswerable,and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world.And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered:"Transient are all.They,being born,must die,and,being dead,are glad to be at rest."But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest.
He is a workman on the ranch,an old man,an immigrant Italian.
He takes his hat off to me in all servility,because,forsooth,Iam to him a lord of life.I am food to him,and shelter,and existence.He has toiled like a beast all his days,and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls.He is labour-crippled.He shambles as he walks.One shoulder is twisted higher than the other.His hands are gnarled claws,repulsive,horrible.As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen.His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.
"His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition,"the White Logic chuckles to me."He is sense-drunk.
He is the slave of the dream of life.His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions.He believes in a transcendent over-world.He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets,who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise.
He feels inarticulate self-affinities,with self-conjured non-realities.He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars.Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him,and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception.