Back to Methuselah

In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast out to the surface it dies like deep-sea fish: what you see is only its cold dead body. We have tapped that central heat as prehistoric man tapped water springs; but nothing has come up alive from those flaming depths: your landscapes, your mountains, are only the world’s cast skins and decaying teeth on which we live like microbes. Ecrasia Ancient: you blaspheme against Nature and against Man. The She-Ancient Child, child, how much enthusiasm will you have for man when you have endured eight centuries of him, as I have, and seen him perish by an empty mischance that is yet a certainty? When I discarded my dolls as he discarded his friends and his mountains, it was to myself I turned as to the final reality. Here, and here alone, I could shape and create. When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three heads. The He-Ancient I also came to understand such miracles. For fifty years I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will. The She-Ancient So did I; and for five more years I made myself into all sorts of fantastic monsters. I walked upon a dozen legs: I worked with twenty hands and a hundred fingers: I looked to the four quarters of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads. Children fled in amazement from me until I had to hide myself from them; and the ancients, who had forgotten how to laugh, smiled grimly when they passed. The He-Ancient We have all committed these follies. You will all commit them. The Newly Born Oh, do grow a lot of arms and legs and heads for us. It would be so funny. The He-Ancient My child: I am just as well as I am. I would not lift my finger now to have a thousand heads. The She-Ancient But what would I not give to have no head at all? All The Young What’s that? No head at all? Why? How? The He-Ancient Can you not understand? All The Young Shaking their heads. No. The She-Ancient One day, when I was tired of learning to walk forward with some of my feet and backwards with others and sideways with the rest all at once, I sat on a rock with my four chins resting on four of my palms, and four or my elbows resting on four of my knees. And suddenly it came into my mind that this monstrous machinery of heads and limbs was no more me than my statues had been me, and that it was only an automaton that I had enslaved. Martellus Enslaved? What does that mean? The She-Ancient A thing that must do what you command it is a slave; and its commander is its master. These are words you will learn when your turn comes. The He-Ancient You will also learn that when the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him. The She-Ancient And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of a slave. The He-Ancient When we discovered that, we shed our superfluous heads and legs and arms until we had our old shapes again, and no longer startled the children. The She-Ancient But still I am the slave of this slave, my body. How am I to be delivered from it? The He-Ancient That, children, is the trouble of the ancients. For whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death, and our destiny is not achieved. The Newly Born What is your destiny? The He-Ancient To be immortal. The She-Ancient The day will come when there will be no people, only thought. The He-Ancient And that will be life eternal. Ecrasia I trust I shall meet my fatal accident before that day dawns. Arjillax For once, Ecrasia, I agree with you. A world in which there were nothing plastic would be an utterly miserable one. Ecrasia No limbs, no contours, no exquisite lines and elegant shapes, no worship of beautiful bodies, no poetic embraces in which cultivated lovers pretend that their caressing hands are wandering over celestial hills and enchanted valleys, no⁠— Acis Interrupting her disgustedly. What an inhuman mind you have, Ecrasia! Ecrasia Inhuman! Acis Yes: inhuman. Why don’t you fall in love with someone? Ecrasia I! I have been in love all my life. I burned with it even in the egg. Acis Not a bit of it. You and Arjillax are just as hard as two stones. Ecrasia You did not always think so, Acis. Acis Oh, I know. I offered you my love once, and asked for yours. Ecrasia And did I deny it to you, Acis? Acis You didn’t even know what love was. Ecrasia Oh! I adored you, you stupid oaf, until I found that you were a mere animal. Acis And I made no end of a fool of myself about you until I discovered that you were a mere artist. You appreciated my contours! I was plastic, as Arjillax says. I wasn’t a man to you: I was a masterpiece appealing to your tastes and your senses. Your tastes and senses had overlaid the direct impulse of life in you. And because I cared only for our life, and went straight to it, and was bored by your calling my limbs fancy names and mapping me into mountains and valleys and all the rest of it, you called me an animal. Well, I am an animal, if you call a live man an animal. Ecrasia You need not explain. You refused to be refined. I did my best to lift your prehistoric impulses on to the plane of beauty, of imagination, of romance, of poetry, of art, of⁠— Acis These things are