Adrien Le Corbeau

“ The sequoia, even if it had had the power, would not have been sorry no longer to breathe in the odours of the world, nor feel the sunlight, nor pump the sap up and down its weather-beaten trunk. At its hour of death it was desiring death, the great sleep in which lay repose, with all its strength, even with its finest stomata, its inmost grain, its remotest root; and if this was the issue of its seven thousand years, such should be the issue of a dog's corresponding fifteen years, of a man's seventy years, of a planet's millions.
In the midst of eternity an age is not so long. ”

“ Up one side of the time-worn trunk stretched an enormous scar, the relic of a gaping wound where once lightning had struck and gashed the tree so that sap ran out to waste. It took the giant more than a hundred years to close that wound, a period which, for the tree, compared well with the month in which our human flesh heals up: since time has no beginning nor ending, is neither long nor short, has no halting-places and never changes: its duration is relative to the life of the things which are its vehicle, and expresses itself only in them. ”

“ The younger sequoia trees which had survived the greatest of their family would flourish for a long while yet, and enjoy the vigour of their cool fragrant sap; but the fall of the giant would be theirs in the end. They would go brittle and inert before the fatal hour. Neither the light of day, nor warmth, nor the kindly earth would any more be profitable to them. Their substance would dissolve infallibly into a fine red dust, smelling mournfully of age. Only time and space, of all the universe, remain for ever changeless. ”

“ The indestructible elements whirl unceasing in the universe, moving from an out-worn structure to a new one, dissolving and amalgamating without rest till they rejoin the ever-lasting silence—whence they will leap out again to like adventures, or towards yet unknown variations, in turn to scatter in a dust of atoms. An embodiment may last for a day or for hundreds of thousands of years; but its inevitable end is in the chaos of infinity.
On the sun-bathed earth an irrefragable peace had at last drowned the ruins of the tree. With its death one particular adventure in creation was run. ”

“ The universe withstands, unmoved, the passing of trees and beings and things. In its season everything must defile before the mirror of changeless time. Plants in their fading go the way of suns as they grow cold, of dreams as they pass on waking, of an insect as it perishes. In the imperishable universe things are born only to die. We, as atoms of the stream of life, can stiffen ourselves with the knowledge that we suffer only the common fate of all created things; that the same fate rules both material and spiritual things, men and stars following one curve in their careers ”

“ Time then is not to be divided into centuries and hours and minutes: but just as each atom figures a world in itself, so each moment is an eternity, one link in an endless chain which binds the remotest past to the remotest future. Time's mirror may look with changeless face upon the tens of thousands of events which defile before it and pass away leaving no mark;—but that is not to say that these events are without issue, since their consequences ripple out into space for ever and ever. What has happened never wholly ceases to happen. ”

“ In the same light, in the same conditions and circumstances, flowers bloom and fade, our hair turns from its first dark or fair colour into silver, our eyes lose their early fire, our firm red flesh goes dry and shrivelled. These changes happen to the same drop of sap in the plant world, and to the same tissue in the animal world. In the unexplored world of instinct our senses follow a similar evolution. Our enthusiasm for something or other springs to life, lasts awhile, and then chills into complete detachment. ”

“ Yet we should remind ourselves that if a being under our eyes passes in a second from life to death, yet in that same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the mysterious courses of organic nature: just as while lightning is striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment, simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful heat of mother-earth, beyond our sphere of control. We should note that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical superiority over destruction, whether it concerns men or animals or plants. ”

“ In high heaven the wheeling stars prepare themselves to receive life, or to grow desolate; all is in flux, transforms itself, repeats itself, dies: even what seems to us most assured and everlasting. While we ourselves, atoms of the universe, endure our sentence of imprisonment in life according to inexorable law, until the term of death.
In such a chaos, where, amidst millions of clashing forces, millions of destinies are being worked out, what can be the purpose of the all-seeing Eye? what inconceivable end has He designed for the living and for the dead, for the stars, for all creation? ”

“ Only dreams seem able to assert themselves beyond the face of time's unchanging mirror. They shine and register, wheel and flit in the darkling mist of eternity, with something of its power to embrace æons and seconds alike. Like eternity too they harmonize and arrange the great things of the universe with the least, with things so small that they leave no mark even in the cloud-confines of the immaterial: and again like eternity they have no beginning and no end, and so convey something of the incommunicable character of chaos. ”

“ Thus in that lifeless November the giant seemed lost in a white trance. If we are vivid in springtime, in autumn we wish for sleep and dreams. A vagueness is the nature of the falling year. Up above, in space, great deep clouds expanded gradually. They dragged themselves along in languor, while their slow shadows darkened the moist earth and climbed the stripped branches of the giant pine. In this misty autumnal afternoon against its sad background all movement seemed slack. A formless but dreamy instinct seemed implicit in animals and plants and things. ”

“ Against this background the seasons passed leisurely, the complete year seeming swifter than its parts: so that if an ever-living spirit could have fixed itself deep within the fibres of the giant trunk while the waves of time broke about it, and counted them as they came, it would have found centuries fly past as lightly as single years. If our faculties and standards of perception had been applicable to the pine, how beautiful we, in its place, would have thought the world! ”

“ In all the world there is no force able to extend or prolong our sensibility beyond its fixed term; which may be a reflection upon the poverty of our means of apprehension. We would not hear the crash of two colliding planets as loudly as the piercing of our ear-drums by a pin-point, and to be burned alive in some conflagration is for the individual as though the universe went up in flame, since for those few seconds of his agony the intensity of the heat of his burning house is as great upon him as the fires of an incandescent world. ”

“ We are fully aware that these substances are all carbon in divers forms; but that raises the fresh question, when we ponder it, whether the whole universe is not of a single sameness—a vision of mind-wracking infinity repeating itself in a perpetual changeless series? and that might lead us to stand in astonished awe before a nature which can make a bone, or pearl-shell, or a wing-case, or a claw, or an eyelash from the same elements whether they are of the air we breathe, of the light shining from our eyes, or of any other transformation of appearance or taste. ”

“ The outside forces, despite their violence, could not prevail over the insignificant seed whose giant bulk would some day laugh at the roaring of the winds and the struggles of the waves; and as it was tossed about during the night in the immensity of shadow and water, may not the sense of past existence have come to life in it, and a memory of that other chaos with the very different terrors, as experienced by its forbears in the first stages of the world? ”

“ Our thousands of lives, magnificent or sordid, long or short, great or small, as they happen to be on earth, leave no mark in space and time. The glory or the shame of what has been bears value and meaning only in our fitful solitary dreams. Should we consider them as having never existed—all these things which have had life and have, under the law, returned to the chaos which called them forth—now only as the dust of forces and of time? The elements remain eternally unchanged, however protean their assumed shapes: perhaps what we term life and death are only their incidental phases. ”

“ We might live more in love with death if we knew that our dust would remain under the sun, to change and re-model itself in plant-fashion, like those yellow leaves which wither and fall before winter comes. It would assuage our minds if we could think that after our end we would live yet in the shimmering day, absorbed particles of that great life-filled space this side the limitless ether of the stars. ”

“ We are able to laugh and cry, to love and hate, in our narrow bounds, forgetting for the while the agony of the unknown which encompasses us, and forgetting to ask the how and why, the purpose of each act of life, its relation to the universe. We are able to exist by and according to the impulses of our own flesh and spirit, as each species exists according to the particular measure and direction of its means.
The forest giant also had its time. A pine-seed after manifold adventures transformed itself, in a course of admirable permutations, into a mighty tree for more than seventy centuries. ”

“ Life seems to whirl like a top, getting apparently the momentum for a new spin from each spin past, but actually failing steadily towards its final rest. Each slipping moment leaves us inevitably nearer to our end, however it may seem to give us spring and key for fuller existence. Especially in spring-time does a new life seem to be working in us. A mute exhilaration flows through all our nerves, making them tingle like the needles of the giant pine. ”

“ May it not be rather that our sharpest colouring comes from the volatile and obscure matter of our ideas and dreams, with its rich palette of innumerable shades? Only by means of the abstract part of our nature do we commune with the universe. Our likes and dislikes, our delights and despairs are not the issue of our carnal parts, offspring of our blood and nerves, except in so far as these are submissive conductors of the hidden reactions of our imagination. A single dream will change the current of our life, and our actions are the product of the powerful but hidden inner world of our minds. ”

“ This fact we can grasp only piecemeal, not in its whole; but it is clear that always there is an analogy between extremes. We know that plant-roots are like their heads. Dawn and twilight (opposed limits of a natural event) are like one another: the same pallid colours, the same freshness, the same effect of unambitious calm. Sunrise and sunset, respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our day-star, glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red. Old age and childhood, the two poles of human life, resemble one another in their feebleness and weak vitality. ”

“ Our loves and braveries and hates are coloured by powers beyond our will's control. A single sentiment may express itself in divers shapes according to the circumstances in which we move. A passionate outburst may be one in a closed room, another in a street, quite different in open country. The giant tree felt its feelings change according to the state of the landscape over which it towered: just as men are peculiarly liable to be strong or weak, safe or fearful, forthcoming or callous according to their attitude, their stage-setting, the occult influences which hem them in. ”

“ Sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or winter. When the year dies the current of life is dying too, whereas in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem doubly desolate. The warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and plants, the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief, which, when autumn comes, is in keeping with the common tendency of nature, and becomes moderate, soothed by the absence of joy in others. ”

“ Look upon the million needles of the sequoia pine, how they everlastingly breathed in and out, drawing gases and water from the air and returning others. The stomata never stopped work for an instant. Within the seeds the sap worked as unceasingly. Nothing ever dwells in absolute inertia for a moment anywhere. The atmosphere vibrates, light pierces, hearts beat, water flows, the molecules of crystals build themselves together, the stars revolve, the air stirs, the darkness is propitious to growth: through everything is spun the cord of love and labour. ”

“ To mankind a sentiment of it may return in many forms—in a snatch of music, in a perfume, in some subtle vibration or illumination of the atmosphere—and these returns are authentic parcels of the original moment, for time is to be divorced neither from material nor immaterial things. This Present, which to us will so soon be Past, keeps, as it flies, something of its true essence, and will revive its influence a year, a century, thousands of centuries later, in some scent or sound, or unforeseen collocation of circumstance. ”

“ Fanatics owe their superhuman endurance during horrible mutilations of the flesh to this same power, which also gives to martyrs the perfect calm of soul in which they tread the threshold of an awful death.
May not this flexible mistress of our understanding be made of the same essence as the motive force of the universe? Not our reason but our imagination enables us to grasp the conception of illimitable chaos, to comprehend the music of the farthest spheres, to overleap all distance and cast the sum of the faintest stars. ”