¶13It is offered also to YOU, to whom his last words speak in your own language.
¶18I have called these two books histories because, to me, they speak with all the authority of one who has read the documents and given us the fruits of true research. Stapledon himself, perhaps more wisely, called them myths. In factual form they tell the story of a quest and of its goal—the spirit's search for a sure path through the problem of good and evil to the throne of God.
¶24For fear of making omissions I shall not name any of the friends who read and discussed the early sections of this book with Olaf while he was writing it, but I must acknowledge with gratitude the final reading and comment on the whole by our good friend Professor L. C. Martin.
¶25To Mrs. Ruth Backhouse (Ruth Tallis) who twenty-three years ago had made the typescript of *Last and First Men*, and who not only typed the present work but spent hours with me poring over the difficult places in the manuscript, I owe more than I can say for the courage her kindness gave me.
¶44Must it be, then, that I am indeed lying to myself? Do I, in my very passion for you, sin against you? Saluting you, do I betray you? And is this my hell?
¶87And now, suddenly in my heart also, you hotly reproach me. Or is it that you are testing me? 'See now where you have landed yourself, through perversely conceiving me as God! Of course you can easily, in your own mild and well-endurable desolation, persuade yourself that I am both the bright and the dark. But if your nails were being torn back, or the nerves of your teeth drilled for sheer malice; or if you were compelled to watch this happen to your dearest, would you then imagine that such devilry was all part of cosmical poetry? Would you sit back in your royal box applauding the aesthetic rightness of her agony? Were the masters of Buchenwald my ministers? Did I, for my poetry's perfection, hunt down negroes for slaves, and pack them in the slave-ships? Did I send children into the mines, congest the slums, create the atom bomb? Is all the frustration and agony of all the worlds in all the aeons mere imagery for my poetry?'
¶92Well, if it is so, haltingly, for me, it is perhaps so with full clarity for some; and potentially, for all. There is indeed the redeeming vision, if only we have the strength to see it; if only you grant us grace for the seeing of it.
¶93In my heart again you speak. 'And so, for you at least, the door to salvation stands ajar. But if your dearest were in agony, and shared not the vision, could you still have peace? And what of the many who are tortured beyond their breaking-point, and those from whom the vision is always withheld?'
¶94You perplex me beyond the limit of my intelligence. All that is certain is that I must take their suffering into my heart without reserve, and make compassion issue in selfless service. Yet, serving faithfully, I must still salute the vision.
¶104Yet, miracle of miracles, my prayer does find its answer. For you, you in my heart, have spoken to me. You, who will not let me call you God, you have said in my heart, 'I am, and you are mine. Even your sin is mine.'
¶146To this deserved rebuke there was no answer. For a while we were silent. Then I ventured, 'God speaks again in me. He says, "My fool prophet has misconstrued my prompting. He was concerned with his own need, not with yours. I am all things to all souls according to their need. To those who have not greatly suffered I am the stern discarder of unfit instruments; but to those who have passed through fire I am the crucified Christ who knows what suffering is and finds comfort for each sufferer. Though I am indeed the just God and the God of wrath, I am also the loving father and the tender mother. I am the young Love God also, seeking and saving and delighting in his darling; and I am the divinely fair and gentle Goddess whom all men seek. Yes, and I am at once the passionate and holy Spirit, struggling against great odds for fulfilment within the universe; and yet also the ultimate and absolute Mystery, untouched by the Spirit's triumph and failure."'
¶191Is this perhaps hell's most exquisite refinement, that one should be haunted by the ever-present ghost of a disbelieved-in God?
¶196Later, no doubt, I shall regret my choice. I shall ridicule myself for my folly and rashness. For I acted without adequate knowledge of the facts, knowing only that to have refrained from acting would have been too easy, and might perhaps in the end turn out to be a grave betrayal. So I chose action. Addressing you in my mind, I said, 'Illusion though you are, I prefer to act in the pretence of your reality, rather than from stark nothingness. Without the fiction of your existence I am no more than a reflex animal, and the world is dust.'
¶200My little choice has already driven me to the necessity of once more choosing. Either I ride forward on the fiction of your existence, and attempt a deed more formidable, with consequences more far-reaching and more painful; or I choose freedom, discard my illusion of you, and slink back into my lair of safety, but of desolation.
¶203Yet I choose to go forward.
¶216But if through frailty I still hold back, so that once more darkness brews within me, may I at least never again forget that the murk is of my own making, and that indeed, indeed I have seen you, that you are real.
¶225But this we do know, and it is enough. Wherever, in all the worlds throughout every galaxy, creatures have awakened to be at least humanly self-aware and aware of each other, there you are the mind's star, the heart's heart. Those who have glimpsed you cannot but salute you, and strive to manifest you.
¶372On this moonless and star-brilliant night, I have come out on to the hill yearning to find you, if not in my heart, then in the heavens. But in my heart and mind you are silent, and the constellations are not your features. The heavens declare nothing. The human lights of the town beneath me tell me nothing. Beyond the houses the sea is nothing but a flat darkness.
¶380Yet well it may be, it must be, that both the new pictures of the cosmos, these latest, proudest feats of terrestrial observation and intelligence, are but a very little nearer to the truth than the East's elephant and tortoise.
¶381Yes, but for us today they have authority. Some such explosion of ever-receding galaxies, each with its scattered population of earths, is now the background of all human life.
¶396Is it not so? Describing it so, am I not true to you, phantom deity, adorable figment of all waking hearts?
¶411But alas, even as I say this, I hear seemingly your laughter. Ineffable fiction, you have become more real to me even than my humanity.
¶500Most real phantom! I dare not, I cannot, I will not, ever again turn from you.
¶523Your voice of scorn shatters my consoling faith in your ultimate gentleness. Can it indeed be you that are crying out in my heart, ‘Fool and coward! Once more you project man’s need for love upon the heavens, lightly conceiving that I, within you and beyond the galaxies, am universal love. Fool! If I am the God of Love, I am equally the God of Wrath. If I am God at all I am also Satan. Consider that Beelzebub, Ahriman, Juggernaut, Moloch and all fiendly gods are pale symbols of the Horror that is I. Whatever is terrible and whatever loathsome, that is I. If I am the frail and elegant flower of gentleness, I am equally, nay more truly, the tough root that revels in ordure. If I am the benign sunny weather, I am equally the hurricane, the thunder, the white fury of the lightning. I am the typhoon that flings great ships upon the inland rocks. I am the earthquake that crumbles whole cities, and the eruption of nether fire that overwhelms them. I am the deadly cold of the Arctic and of the abysses between the galaxies. I am the ice-cold heart of the cosmos.
¶527I hear it again. 'My dearest triumph of all,' it is saying, 'is to wring from my creatures not only fear and loathing but also heart-felt abject worship. As the rabbit awaits the stoat, so they must accept me. Knowing that I shall destroy them, they must cringingly adore.'
¶528True! It is hideously true. I myself, though hopeless of mercy or reward, I myself who loathe the horror that is acceptable to you, and loathe you for accepting it, cannot but irrationally adore.
¶565You are demanding of me, 'Can you in all sincerity declare that you did indeed escape from your individual self-hood into a loftier sphere? If it were so in fact, you would be henceforth another being. You would be fearless, wholly generous, wise beyond all human wisdom; and your peace would be unshakable. But it is not so. You will soon find that you are the same timorous, the self-concerned, the ignorant and easily subverted creature that you were. All that is changed is that with your new and clearer vision you will henceforth try perhaps a little harder to behave decently. No! You were not transported into glory, you were not transformed. Simply, through the impact of new vision you escaped for a while from your self-concern and fear, and rose to a more generous interest and a purer will. Through the quickening touch of my presence you found not union but worship.'
¶672Your stern voice arrests me. 'It is high time for you to make up your mind whether you will continue to wallow in gross self-pity, disguised as compassion for your kind, or whether you will be mine wholeheartedly, not merely with occasional polite protestations of worship, but in action, self-less action with your world.' Fear silences me. I can but listen. You seem to say, 'Have done with excusing yourself on the plea that full illumination is withheld from you. You know very well that you are unfit for it. If it were given you now, you would be blinded and paralysed. Cherish such vision as is possible to you; but do not brood upon it. Let it arm you for action.' But alas, I know very well that I am not strong enough to serve you as you demand. Have I not tried? Have I not many times failed? I am proved a minnow, teased by moments of vision, but limited inexorably by my minnowhood. You yourself have said it. Then what real choice have I? Earnestly desiring to be wholly obedient to your dictates in my heart, I am yet continually and irresistibly controlled by lusts and fears. I am little more than an automaton. You have given me a vision of the Way, but at every turn my minnowhood distracts me from it. Coldly your voice breaks in upon me. 'As minnow, you are indeed limited to your automatic minnow nature; but in your own heart you know that you can a little control your minnow nature. Do not be so easily hypnotized by the clever but shallow sciences of your world. They are products of the pond alone, true of pond-nature only. But the pond is not all. And you yourself can never again believe that it is all. Influences not discoverable by the intelligence limited wholly to that lowly sphere are none the less at work in it. You have no longer any excuse to cling to the fiction that you are nothing but a mechanism. You are indeed that, so long as you wilfully ignore the element in you which is of another sphere. With a sincere act of will you can, within limits, wrest the automaton from its course. Indeed, with an earnest enough act of will, and the needful understanding, you could rise to the highest sphere of all; but after a life-time and an ancestry of gross pond-habits, it is extremely unlikely that you will make so great an effort. Nothing prevents you but ignorance and laziness; but, then, how ignorant and lazy you have allowed yourself to become! What is demanded of you, however, is not that you should leap to the very apex of spiritual being, nor even that you should suddenly become a saint. What is demanded of you is only that, without any extravagant or seemingly miraculous act of waking and self-re-creating, you should make the little effort that would hold you constantly upon your lowly and preliminary stage of the Way, instead of constantly erring and bemoaning.'
¶673Daimon, since you affirm in my heart that I can do it, then surely I can. I must. I will.
¶686It shall be so, if you grant me strength and skill to walk that knife edge.