V In the Rockies
Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent. “Click—click—click—Pick—pick—pick—Pock—pock—pockets.” So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.
It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was obliged to beg a night’s rest. The yellow youth assented, with his air of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he could. About sunset, the storm passed away over the plains. Behind its flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as profound, a thousand miles of grass where men and cattle crept like flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one newspaper topic to another we passed to the talk about signalling to Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining bright above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the infinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently remarked: “Gee! I guess then it doesn’t matter two cents after all who gets elected president!” Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long since the notion of infinite space and infinite worlds has impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,—that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter’s intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend and in whom they rest.
And I recalled the passage:
“Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
Virtù di carità, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta.
Se disiassimo esser più superne,
Fôran discordi gli nostri disiri
Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;
Che vedrai non capere in questi giri,
S’essere in caritate è qui necesse,
E se la sua natura ben rimiri;
Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia,
Perch’una fansi nostre voglie stesse.
Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia
Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace,
Com’allo re, che in suo voler ne invoglia.
E la sua volontade è nostra pace:
Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si muove
Cio ch’ ella crea o che natura face.”3
And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality—to the clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg and New York. In all this continent, I thought, in all the western world, there is not a human soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least of all the peace of God. All move, but about no centre; they move on, to more power, to more wealth, to more motion. There is not one of them who conceives that he has a place, if only he could find it, a rank and order fitted to his nature, higher than some, lower than others, but right, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmic scheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life, like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, no significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and spirit. “Click—click—click—tick—tick—tick,” so goes the economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light “pinnacled dim in the intense inane.” “America is a clock,” I said; and then I remembered the phrase, “America is Niagara.” And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out into unconsciousness.
The sun was shining brightly when I woke, and I had slept away my mood of the night. I took leave of my host, and under his directions, after half a mile along the line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed for miles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of red rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance of pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by a notice, set up, apparently, in the desert:
“Keep out. Avoid trouble. This means you.”
I laughed. “Keep out!” I said. “If only there were a chance of my getting in!” “Avoid trouble! Ah, what trouble would I not face, could I but get in!” And I went on, but not in, and met no trouble, and returned to the hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour, in the hall, the shifting interminable array of vacant eyes and blank faces, and then retired to write this letter; “and so to bed.”
Footnotes
3
“Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst,
“Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant from his will who here assorteth us,
“And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if thou think again what is love’s nature.
“Nay, ’tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made one.
“So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold, throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth;
“And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that it createth and that nature maketh.”
Dante, Purgatorio, iii. 70-87 (trans. by Rev. Philip H. Wicksteed, in the “Temple Classics” edition).