Читать книгу The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 - Томас Де Квинси - Страница 9

Mystery unfathomable of Death! Mystery unapproachable of God! Destined it was, from the foundations of the world, that each mystery should make war upon the other: once that the lesser mystery should swallow up for a moment a limbus of the greater; and that woe is past: once that the greater mystery should swallow up for ever the whole vortex of the lesser; and that glory is yet to come. After which man, that is the son of God, shall lift up his eyes for ever, saying, 'Behold! these were two mysteries; and one is not; and there is but one mystery that survives for ever!'

If an eternity (Death supposed) is as vast as a star, yet the most miserable of earthly blocks not four feet square will eclipse, masque, hide it from centre to circumference. And so it really is. Incredible as it might seem apart from experience, the dreadful reality of death is utterly withdrawn from us because itself dwindles to an apparent mote, and the perishing non-reality thickens into a darkness as massy as a rock.

Great changes summon to great meditations. Daily we see the most joyous of events take a colouring of solemnity from the mere relation in which they stand to an uncertain future: the birth of a child, heir to the greatest expectations, and welcomed clamorously by the sympathy of myriads, speaks to the more reflecting in an undertone of monitory sadness, were it only as a tribute to the frailty of human expectations: and a marriage-day, of all human events the most lawfully festal, yet needs something of effort to chase away the boding sadness which settles unavoidably upon any new career; the promise is vague, but new hopes have created new dangers, and responsibilities contracted perhaps with rapture are charged with menace.

For every one of us, male or female, there is a year of crisis—a year of solemn and conscious transition, a year in which the light-hearted sense of the irresponsible ceases to gild the heavenly dawn. A year there is, settled by no law or usage, for me perhaps the eighteenth, for you the seventeenth, for another the nineteenth, within the gates of which, underneath the gloomy archway of which, sits a phantom of yourself.

Turn a screw, tighten a linch-pin—which is not to disease, but perhaps to exalt, the mighty machinery of the brain—and the Infinities appear, before which the tranquillity of man unsettles, the gracious forms of life depart, and the ghostly enters. So profoundly is this true, that oftentimes I have said of my own tremendous experience in this region—destined too certainly, I fear, finally to swallow up intellect and the life of life in the heart, unless God of His mercy fetches me away by some sudden death—that death, considered as an entrance to this ghostly world, is but a postern-gate by comparison with the heaven-aspiring vestibule through which this world of the Infinite introduces the ghostly world.

Time, if it does not diminish grief, alters its character. At first we stretch out our hands in very blindness of heart, as if trying to draw back again those whom we have lost. But, after a season, when the impotence of such efforts has become too sensibly felt, finding that they will not come back to us, a strange fascination arises which yearns after some mode of going to them. There is a gulf fixed which childhood rarely can pass. But we link our wishes with whatsoever would gently waft us over. We stretch out our hands, and say, 'Sister, lend us thy help, and plead for us with God, that we may pass over without much agony.'

The joy of an infant, or joy-generation, without significance to an unprofound and common mind—how strange to see the excess of pathos in that; yet men of any (or at least of much) sensibility see in this a transpicuous masque for another form, viz., the eternal ground of sorrow in all human hearts. This, by the way, in an essay on William Wordsworth, should be noticed as the charm of his poetry; and the note differential, in fact. At least, I know not of any former poet who has so systematically sought his sadness in the very luxury of joy. Thus, in the 'Two April Mornings,' 'what a mortal freshness of dewy radiance! what an attraction of early summer! what a vision of roses in June! Yet it is all transmuted to a purpose of sadness.'

Ah, reader, scorn not that which—whether you refuse it or not as the reality of realities—is assuredly the reality of dreams, linking us to a far vaster cycle, in which the love and the languishing, the ruin and the horror, of this world are but moments—but elements in an eternal circle. The cycle stretches from an East that is forgotten to a West that is but conjectured. The mere fact of your own individual calamity is a life; the tragedy is a nature; the hope is but as a dim augury written on a flower.5

If the things that have fretted us had not some art for retiring into secret oblivion, what a hell would life become! Now, understand how in some nervous derangements this horror really takes place. Some things that had sunk into utter forgetfulness, others that had faded into visionary power, all rise as gray phantoms from the dust; the field of our earthly combats that should by rights have settled into peace, is all alive with hosts of resurrections—cavalries that sweep in gusty charges—columns that thunder from afar—arms gleaming through clouds of sulphur.

God takes care for the religion of little children wheresoever His Christianity exists. Wheresoever there is a national Church established, to which a child sees all his protectors resort; wheresoever he beholds amongst earthly creatures whom most he honours prostrate in devotion before these illimitable heavens, which fill to overflowing the total capacities of his young adoring heart; wheresoever at intervals he beholds the sleep of death, falling upon the men or women whom he has seen—a depth stretching as far below his power to fathom as those persons ascend beyond his powers to pursue—God speaks to their hearts by dreams and their tumultuous grandeurs. Even by solitude does God speak to little children, when made vocal by the services of Christianity, as also he does by darkness wheresoever it is peopled with visions of His almighty power. For a pagan child, for a Greek child, solitude was nothing; for a Christian child it is made the power of God, and the hieroglyphic of His most distant truth. The solitude in life is deep for the millions who have none to love them, and deep for those who suffer by secret and incommunicable woe and have none to pity them. Thus, be you assured that though infancy talks least of that which slumbers deepest, it yet rests in its own transcendent solitude. But infancy, you say, talks surely most of that which is uppermost in its heart. Yes, doubtless of that which is uppermost, but not at all of that which slumbers below the foundations of its heart.

[And then follows a suggestion to put in a note:]

I except one case, the case of any child who is marked for death by organic disease, and knows it. In such cases the creature is changed—that which would have been unchildlike ceases to offend, for a new character is forming.