Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 33

TWENTY-FOUR

A YOUNG MAN whose heaven has recently altered its position, shooting down from the transcendental to the historical plane, is likely to be thrown into greater bewilderment even than other human beings by the fact of death. For until a year ago death and heaven have been so close to each other in his mind that only an unimaginable something, infinite yet infinitesimal, divided them; but now they are separated by an immovable expanse of quite ordinary time, by days, weeks and years just like other days, weeks and years, and there remains nothing to connect death which is here with heaven which is merely somewhere else. The secular transplantation of heaven, which should have brought it closer, has removed it to an inaccessible distance, so that not even man’s last desperate resort, not even death, is of any avail. And as your mind, no matter how ignorantly, demands a meaning for everything, even for death, you may feel at times that your brother is doing something quite unnatural in dying now, and that, to have any meaning, the act should at least be postponed – say for a few hundred years: postponed until he has first known what life can be. It is as though he were dying in a provisional chaos where neither life nor death has yet completely evolved – scarcely even dying therefore, but simply falling into a bottomless hole that swallows everything and gives no sign. And if you suspect in your heart – even though it is palpably untrue – that you have robbed your brother of his girl, you may feel now that you have cheated him of his legitimate death as well, and substituted for it something small and commonplace without his knowing what has happened.

If Mansie Manson felt this, he was hardly aware of it, for his most articulate sensation was one of painful and embarrassed repugnance, a repugnance that muffled without softening the icy and majestic dread which heralds the approach of death. And that he should feel this embarrassed repugnance was inevitable, although he did not know it; for the new creed he had embraced was different from all the older faiths of mankind in one startling respect: that it did not take death into account at all, but left it as an arbitrary fact, a private concern of the dead. It took death so little into account that it could comfortably transform death into a mere moment in the progress of life towards its Utopian goal, a necessary and indeed progressive factor in human destiny; for how except through death could the ever-advancing armies of the generations relieve one another? It socialised death so radically as to forget altogether that it is human beings who die, and that all human beings must die. It transmuted death into another kind of life, so that, pitifully isolated in your ego and in time, you could still believe that you would live on in the lives, as pitifully isolated, of the legatees of your breath; or that, consigned to the earth, you would enjoy at least a sort of immortality in the fortuitous flowers that might spring from your dust, a chemical or biochemical immortality through which finally, it might be, you would enter in some appropriate incarnation into the chemical bliss of your far distant Utopia.

Not having any great intelligence or sincerity of mind Mansie Manson was quite incapable of perceiving this; as incapable as he was of seeing that, in spite of its extreme Utopianism, his faith contained as necessarily as the strictest Calvinism a dogma of reprobation. A dogma of reprobation far more sweeping, indeed, than Calvin’s, for until the gates of the earthly heaven are opened all who die are automatically lost. Automatically, for it does not matter whether you have striven for that heaven or perversely turned your back upon it; in either case you are lost ‘by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment’: Calvin’s words used in another connection apply with just as overwhelming cogency to you.

All this Mansie might have discovered had he chosen, or been able, to understand the Marxian interpretation of history, which for all its harshness is the true theology of every Utopian religion. But he was quite incapable of understanding it, or of seeing that the penalty for certainty in any faith, heavenly or earthly, is some form of predestination, involving election and damnation. He accepted the inevitability of the heaven with which Marx’s economic doctrine had presented him, but he disliked Marxians as heartily as a popular religious enthusiast dislikes theologians who insist on demonstrating the necessity of hell. They were a set of sordid-minded materialists who kept nice people out of the movement.

Yet now that Tom lay on his back unable to stir or to speak, passively submitting to the automatic process of death, Mansie, while still clinging to his far distant heaven, felt that Tom was incomprehensibly and irretrievably lost, lost as one might be who had died on a world frozen to rigidity long before this world came into existence. Heaven still floated before him at just the same point in the future; it had not changed its position by a hand’s breadth; but it was as though he realised for the first time exactly how far away it was.

And then, in a clap, the feelings that he had had on the Sunday when he walked to Strathblane, and many times in his childhood, returned again. He felt as he had done when a boy, looking at the farm planted precariously on the side of the hill, that the position of his heaven was in some inexplicable way wrong, so deeply wrong that it filled him with apprehension. He felt that it was not where it should be; yet when he dreamt of another station for it he became blind and could see nothing but a shining vacancy. It was a vague sense of ill-ease that he felt, and it never hardened into a definite thought. But had he been able to read his mind he would have found, strangely enough, that what he longed for was not to bring his dreamt-of heaven nearer, so near that he would be able to see it outspread before him and cross its frontiers and be received finally within it, stepping out of a dying world into one new born, but rather to raise his heaven to some position high above itself, to lever it upwards with his eyebeams to a height where it would no longer be in Time; for so long as it was in Time, Time would sunder him from it. And with his sense of separation his old dread of chaos returned, for chaos is universal separation; and at the uttermost end of the blind longing to lift his heaven from the distant future place where it stood so implacably, there must have been the hope that if it could be raised high enough, uplifted to an inconceivable height, Time would once more become whole and perfect, and a meaning be given not only to present death, but to all the countless dead lying under their green mounds, so that the living and the dead and the unborn might no longer be separated by Time, but gathered together in Time by an everlasting compact beyond Time. All that he felt was an uneasy sense that even the perfect future state was not all that it should be; but when, brooding on Tom’s certain death, he said as he often did now, ‘Well, there’s no use in expecting a miracle to happen,’ he was probably thinking, without knowing it, of a greater miracle. But he had no hope that it would happen.