Void

“ And around all, including all, boundless space, boundless silence; the black, unmoving void—the deep, unending quietude, through which they fell with Saturn and Orion, and mildly-smiling Venus, and the fair, stark-naked moon and the decent earth wreathed in pearl and blue. From afar she appeared, the quiet one, all lonely in the void. As sudden as a fair face in a crowded street. Beautiful as the sound of falling waters. Beautiful as the sound of music in a silence. Like a white sail on a windy sea. Like a green tree in a solitary place. ”

“ And, wandering, he came to a deep wall, catacombed from base to summit with the resting-places of ten thousand dead; and there was one empty place—one black void—inscribed with a name strangely like his own. And a great weariness and faintness came upon him; and the pains, returning, carried back his thoughts to the warmth and dimness of the sick-room.
It seemed to him that this could not be death—he was too weary even to die! But they would put him into the hollow void in the wall!—they might: he would not resist, he felt no fear. He could rest there very well even for a hundred years. ”

“ No more Can we observe what's lost at any time, When things wax old with eld and foul decay, Or when salt seas eat under beetling crags. Thus Nature ever by unseen bodies works.
THE VOID But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked About by body: there's in things a void— Which to have known will serve thee many a turn, Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt, Forever searching in the sum of all, And losing faith in these pronouncements mine. There's place intangible, a void and room. ”

“ All this stir and seethe of lights and people was but the rim, the shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted very much to be on the seething, partially illuminated shore, for within her was the void reality of dark space. ”

“ Time flows into the void; night’s shadows quake with dearth,
The dikes of the black sea of space crumble beneath the night’s wrath,
The heavy foam of darkness sputters forth, and the earth
Swallowed by the gaping depths, swerves from its beaten path. ”

“ Even as the heavier more of matter shows, And how much less of vacant room inside. That which we're seeking with sagacious quest Exists, infallibly, commixed with things— The void, the invisible inane. Right here I am compelled a question to expound, Forestalling something certain folk suppose, Lest it avail to lead thee off from truth: Waters (they say) before the shining breed Of the swift scaly creatures somehow give, And straightway open sudden liquid paths, Because the fishes leave behind them room To which at once the yielding billows stream. ”

“ But now through oceans, lands, and heights of heaven, By divers causes and in divers modes, Before our eyes we mark how much may move, Which, finding not a void, would fail deprived Of stir and motion; nay, would then have been Nowise begot at all, since matter, then, Had staid at rest, its parts together crammed. Then too, however solid objects seem, They yet are formed of matter mixed with void: In rocks and caves the watery moisture seeps, And beady drops stand out like plenteous tears; And food finds way through every frame that lives ”

“ I look upward, and discern no sky, not even an unfathomable void, but only a black, impenetrable nothingness, as though heaven and all its lights were blotted from the system of the universe. It is as if nature were dead, and the world had put on black, and the clouds were weeping for her. With their tears upon my cheek, I turn my eyes earthward, but find little consolation here below. A lamp is burning dimly at the distant corner, and throws just enough of light along the street, to show, and exaggerate by so faintly showing, the perils and difficulties which beset my path. ”

“ For where can scaly creatures forward dart, Save where the waters give them room? Again, Where can the billows yield a way, so long As ever the fish are powerless to go? Thus either all bodies of motion are deprived, Or things contain admixture of a void Where each thing gets its start in moving on. Lastly, where after impact two broad bodies Suddenly spring apart, the air must crowd The whole new void between those bodies formed; But air, however it stream with hastening gusts, Can yet not fill the gap at once—for first It makes for one place, ere diffused through all. ”

“ Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the realms of the world.
Downward I turn my eyes to Night, the holy, ineffable, mysterious. Far below lies the world, sunk in a deep vault; void and lonely is its place. ”

“ It was like that of one beneath whose feet the world suddenly crumbles into ashes and dust, and is scattered throughout the illimitable void, while he survives, blown to some far planet whose strange aspect, however beautiful, fills him with an undefinable terror. ”

“ The moon, the stars, the trees, the snow, the sand when bare, a monumental stillness whose void must be supplied by thought. It extracts thought from the beholder like the void under a cupping glass, raises a swelling. How much a silent mankind might suggest! ”

“ But after this rude man of the Quaternary and Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat different lines. ”

“ For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee; as the air, which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring thy grace and good works! ”

“ If the eye, when it fixes its gaze upon the vault of heaven, could see, in fancy, a causeway arched across the void, and bordered in long series with the hills and plains of an earthly journey—repeated ten thousand and ten thousand times, until ages were spent in the pilgrimage, then would he who possessed such a power of vision hide himself in caverns rather than venture to look up to the terrible magnitude of the starry skies, thus set out in parts before him. ”

“ But the more void within a thing, the more Entirely it totters at their sure assault. Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught, Solid, without a void, they must be then Eternal; and, if matter ne'er had been Eternal, long ere now had all things gone Back into nothing utterly, and all We see around from nothing had been born— But since I taught above that naught can be From naught created, nor the once begotten To naught be summoned back, these primal germs Must have an immortality of frame. ”

“ It must be terrible to be taken suddenly from the warmth of one's bed and dragged through the void into the presence of God. He imagined God as an enormous sun, with a voice of thunder. How it must hurt! It must barn the eyes, ears--all one's soul! ”

“ Shall rush among the stars, and swoon to death.
Yea, the shrunk earth, appearing livid pale
Beneath the red-tongued flame, shall shudder by
From out her ancient place, and leave—a void.
Yet haply by that void the saints redeem'd
May sometimes stray; when memory of sin
Ghost-like shall rise upon their holy souls ”

“ And so, infallibly, alternate-wise Body and void are still distinguished, Since nature knows no wholly full nor void. There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power To vary forever the empty and the full; And these can nor be sundered from without By beats and blows, nor from within be torn By penetration, nor be overthrown By any assault soever through the world— For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems, Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain, Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three ”

“ It was no wonder that with the void as immense as the universe itself and the final surrender to it inevitable in death, one sometimes had delusions of it as the lap of a long lost grandmother and found herself/himself plummeting into that lap from one's balcony. ”

“ I traveled through infinite spaces of void and blackness, and found no sound of voice or life, yet all the time, welling high within me, was a tide, the fullness of which I had never known in my waking hours. ”

“ As an arrow in the air, as a swallow through the sky, so thought upon thought takes flight out of the void into the void, leaving vacancy behind. The motes of fancy glitter in the mind, impalpable, luminous, and innumerable. ”

“ The eye leaves them and returns to earth, and the trembling ear awaits something that will break the oppressive stillness. But no foot-fall of living thing reaches it; no wild beast howls through the solitude. There is no cry of bird to enliven the scene; no tree, among whose branches the winds can sigh and moan. The pulsations of my own heart are alone heard in the great void ”

“ But to do this it was necessary to admit the existence of fluids intangible, invisible, imponderable, three negative terms in which the science of that day chose to see a definition of the void. In modern philosophy there is no void. Ten feet of void and the world crumbles away! To materialists especially the world is full, all things hang together, are linked, related, organized. ”

“ First, because, banishing the void from things, They yet assign them motion, and allow Things soft and loosely textured to exist, As air, dew, fire, earth, animals, and grains, Without admixture of void amid their frame. Next, because, thinking there can be no end In cutting bodies down to less and less Nor pause established to their breaking up, They hold there is no minimum in things ”

“ Over me, about me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence,—the infinite and final Night of space. ”

“ The Preceptor replied saying:—Know my son, that the relics of all things are utterly destroyed at the last deluge; as your thickening dreams disappear in your sound sleep.
6. The hills and rocks on all the ten sides of the earth, are all destroyed without any distinction, and of the actions of men and routine of their business, there remains nothing behind.
7. All beings are destroyed at the end, and the great void (that is the receptacle of all bodies) , becomes a perfect void. ”

“ At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds, Error none') , until he has organised the void and brought into it a light which makes visible the form of the void. ”

“ Because whatsoever I conceived, deprived of this space, seemed to me nothing, yea altogether nothing, not even a void, as if a body were taken out of its place, and the place should remain empty of any body at all, of earth and water, air and heaven, yet would it remain a void place, as it were a spacious nothing. ”

“ We who think in terms of light-years, and nebulae in which our solar system could be lost, and huge constellations far off in the pathless void, realize that we have outgrown even the imagery of this apocalyptic poem. ”

“ We formulize them thus: add body to body and sphere to sphere, until the imagination wearies; and still there will remain beyond, a void, empty, unoccupied SPACE, limitless, because it is void. Add event to event in continuous succession, forever and forever, and there will still remain, before and after, a TIME in which there was and will be no event, and also endless because it too is void. ”

“ Even when I am most amused I feel a void, and now I understand what an aching void is, perfectly well. You know they are going back to Prince's Buildings to the nice house we had last winter; and Emmeline writes me word that the great red puddle which we used to call the Red Sea, and which we were forced to wade through before we could get to the Downs, will not this winter be so terrible, for my father has made a footpath for his "host." ”

“ Hem believes that in the visible world there are void places—vacua, and something more—holes, as it were, through which animate and inanimate objects may fall into the invisible world and be seen and heard no more. ”

“ Now as any body, existing on the Earth, chances to pass, either through its own movement or the Earth's, into a line with any one of these voids, or cosmical abysses, it clearly is no longer attracted in the direction of that void, and for the moment, consequently, is "heavier" than at any period, either after or before. ”

“ For the rock, falling to the loins, — the earth, — revealed itself on Sinai as the Table of the Law.
Chapter III.
1. The globe shook. Among symbolic motions, that of shaking, like shuddering, always precedes birth. Urizen anointed his wound. The ointment flowed down on the void. The void is the womb of Nature. The snake's poison, made of this ointment, is mortal love. ”

“ And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed. ”

“ Ease would recant Vows made in pain, as violent and void. ”

“ It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,—a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,—eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust. ”

“ There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave — under the deep deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush'd — no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free. ”