greatness, the grandeur, and the dignity of existence without which poetry must perish, the imagination wither, and the human species sink into a miserable condition of animal degradation.”
These are weighty words: No such dignified pronouncement has been made in our time. And though I should like to believe that “personality persists after death,” and though I believe that all manner of good would come from the faith, I cannot believe. I often wish I could.
I find myself in closer agreement with Maeterlinck who wrote a series of articles on “Life after Death” in The Fortnightly Review during 1913. He begins by declaring that he has “no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead, but it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that the dead really exist.”
He sums up: “The spiritualist follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds, in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness.
“The fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations; at best, it is but a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. The facts reported may be genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because, at the moment when they can speak to us, they have nothing to tell us, or because, at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us, they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.”
Even Maeterlinck here seems to believe more than I can credit.
It is true that Alfred Russel Wallace believed devoutly in a life after death and believed too, as I have told, that there was continual communication between the dead and the living. But I strained ears in vain and remained at long last a confirmed skeptic. Meredith, too, another wise man, believed in a Divine Providence and the gradual disappearance from this life of all that was maimed or wrong. I could hardly rise to that height of faith. Wise men, I saw, were instruments of good in life and might yet lift this earthly life to a high plane of enjoyment and spiritual growth; but even this appeared to me doubtful and I could find no trace of a God in nature, no hope of a life after death for man. Skepticism was rooted in my nature.
Small wonder that Professor Metchnikoff, one of the greatest modern scientists, declares that “since the awakening of the scientific spirit in Europe, it has been recognized that the promise of a future life has no basis of fact to support it. The modern study of the functions of the mind has shown beyond all question that these are dependent on the functions of the body, in particular of those of the central nervous system.”
I cannot understand why we hesitate to explain life according to our present knowledge. There is no trace of an omnipotent or all-good God to be found anywhere in life; but there is everywhere in animals, as in insects, abounding evidence of a creative impulse, and impulse that is the chief source of our bodily pleasures and is at the same time the soul, so to speak, of all our highest spiritual joys. To deny this universal creative impulse would be as ridiculous, it seems to me, as to talk of goodness in creation.
There are two other facts that appear to consort better with our wishes; we seem to be able to trace hierarchy in living creatures and it is fairly plain that the tenure of life corresponds roughly to this hierarchy. That is, the highest or most complicated creatures live the longest. Furthermore the highest in the hierarchy, men and women, are also the kindliest, the most unselfish, in short the most moral, or rather the only ones in whom morality can be said to exist.
We have then in life a universal creative impulse and this impulse satisfies itself in producing higher and higher creatures; or, if you will, more and more complex creatures, and these creatures in proportion to their complexity live longer than the others and finally develop a morality of kindness and unselfishness which the other creatures know little or nothing about.
There is a certain order in the universe, a rude imperfect order, if you will, but order neverthelessorder and law.
And strange to say, in this cosmos ruled by law, there are continued revelations of pure beauty; now a sunset or sunrise; again a coastline framing a dark blue ocean transfigured by silvery moonlight; or a mountain gorge with pine-clad heights and shadowy depths holding a little rivulet; or simply a superb man's figure or the soul-glow in a girl's eyes. Beauty everywhere, without order of any kind or law that we can detect.
Now is the creative impulse to stop and be satisfied with men and women? That is a question we cannot answer from experience. Some say the creative impulse is committed by its very nature to an endless succession of cycles. I see no reason to believe this; rather I believe that the best men will sooner or later get together and transform this world of ours into an Earthly Paradise by making men and women better and wiser than we can easily imagine them today. It seems so simple to begin by abolishing war and doing away with armies and navies while spending the money thus saved on the education and development of the many. We could thus put an end to poverty and know nothing more of the millionaire or the starving child, and every foot of progress upward would make the next step easier, the good result more certain. The heaven dreamed of can be realized here on this earth and in man's lifetime if we set ourselves to the work.
One cannot resist the question: Are we tending to this goal or are we merely taking our wishes for the spirit and purpose of the Universe? Even so, it may be that our unselfish desires are themselves prophetic of the future.
It looks as if the creative impulse we have found everywhere in life is working out its own fulfillment. How else can we explain the fact that the best men, centuries after their death, are selected out and adored as Gods, their teaching even becoming our example and inspiration?
In truth, we men are called and chosen to a purpose higher than our consciousness. The creative impulse, if not God, is at least a conscious striving to reach the highest. We must cooperate with this impulse and do our best to make this life worth living for all and so turn men and women into ideals and this earthly pilgrimage of ours into a sacred achievement.
CHAPTER V
It was in Shanghai that I first learned that various poisons and aliments are supposed to increase desire or intensify sensation, but I found them no more efficacious than the spiritual theories of Mr. Sinnett. Indeed, in time I came to explain the wide use of drugs throughout China with reference to the curious insensitiveness of Chinese women.
I was taken by a Chinese I met shortly after my arrival from Burma to one of the famous “opium dens” for which China is famous. Frankly, I was very disappointed. I achieved neither the desired physical effect nor that intense state of clear vision attained by Coleridge on the eve on which he wrote “Kubla Khan.” I smoked the prescribed twenty pipes again and again without ever achieving either object.
This was especially true in regards to sex. My friend had obtained a young Chinese woman for me. When I was “high” I was to make love to her. We were taken to the place of our assignation in a rickshaw and once in the room, the Chinese girl immediately put herself at my disposal. A few words of description would not be out of place since, in spite of the fact that I was disappointed with the effect the drug had on me, the girl herself was the picture of loveliness.
She lay cool and naked as yellow marble on the gaudy red-covered divan, her little hands crossed on her full breast and her legs together. Her nipples were large and dark, though they were not engorged, even when I removed my clothes and I stood naked before her, my cock standing straight out in anticipation of the pleasure to come. Her hair was thick and lay in crushed tresses under her back. Between her thighs, under a glossy chevron of hair, her pussy lips were obvious, larger than I personally would have expected, but pretty and warmly moist to the touch. But she made no response as I laid my hand on her mount She remained as cool as a cucumber through the entire operation.
Only the slightest tremor passed through her limbs as I applied my lips to hers, and even when I hovered on the verge of fucking her, it was merely a matter of opening her legs. She had gathered her knees up and they fell open like the pages of a heavy book. I shrugged and moved up closer to her slit, placing the head of my cock against that warmly throbbing entrance. Usually, it has been my experience that a woman will respond to this with
