Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.
Who Has Won to Mastership.
When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought.
We must accept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with the earlier monkey stage. The human had to pass through those stages in its rise from the mire and slime of low organic life. It was inevitable that much of the mire and slime should cling and be not easily shaken off.
Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting. Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead.
Got to take a gamble. The only way to find out is to find out.
And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: “I heard Youth calling in the night: ‘Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky – Yea, I am Youth because I die!
Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.
So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. WORK PERFORMED. The phrase haunted his brain.
He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.
It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen–thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.
And, dying, he declined to die.
It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.
John Barleycorn was blunting me.
He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed.
I am a sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.
Such words he spoke, but they are not his words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually from his lips.
And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.