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down by terrible light.

 

It was not only physical effulgence that struck me down in that supreme

moment of my life. In that moment I guessed what mood it was of the

infinite spirit that had in fact made the cosmos, and constantly

supported it, watching its tortured growth. And it was that discovery

which felled me.

 

For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a

very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made

me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other

end.

 

It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity

with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his

finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at

last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already

lusting for fresh creation.

 

His gaze anatomized me with calm skill, dismissing my imperfections, and

absorbing for his own enrichment all the little excellence that I had

won in the struggle of the ages.

 

In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that,

after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature

loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but

the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.

 

But no sooner had I, in my blinded misery, cried out, than I was struck

dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the

creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if

he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but

the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself.

I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but

the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the

unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

 

Once more, but in shame and adoration, I cried out to my maker. I said,

“It is enough, and far more than enough, to be the creature of so dread

and lovely a spirit, whose potency is infinite, whose nature passes the

comprehension even of a minded cosmos. It is enough to have been

created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously

creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to

have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.”

 

And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy.

 

Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet

interest, my own decline and fall. I saw the populations of the stellar

worlds use up more and more of their resources for the maintenance of

their frugal civilizations. So much of the interior matter of the stars

did they disintegrate, that their worlds were in danger of collapse.

Some worlds did indeed crash in fragments upon their hollow centers,

destroying the indwelling peoples. Most, before the critical point was

reached, were remade, patiently taken to pieces and rebuilt upon a

smaller scale. One by one, each star was turned into a world of merely

planetary size. Some were no bigger than the moon. The populations

themselves were reduced to a mere millionth of their original numbers,

maintaining within each little hollow grain a mere skeleton civilization

in conditions that became increasingly penurious.

 

Looking into the future aeons from the supreme moment of the cosmos, I

saw the populations still with all their strength maintaining the

essentials of their ancient culture, still living their personal lives

in zest and endless novelty of action, still practicing telepathic

intercourse between worlds, still telepathically sharing all that was of

value in their respective world-spirits, still supporting a truly

cosmical community with its single cosmical mind. I saw myself still

preserving, though with increasing difficulty, my lucid consciousness;

battling against the onset of drowsiness and senility, no longer in the

hope of winning through to any more glorious state than that which I had

already known, or of laying a less inadequate jewel of worship before

the Star Maker, but simply out of sheer hunger for experience, and out

of loyalty to the spirit.

 

But inevitably decay overtook me. World after world, battling with

increasing economic difficulties, was forced to reduce its population

below the numbers needed for the functioning of its own communal

mentality. Then, like a degenerating brain-center, it could no longer

fulfil its part in the cosmical experience.

 

Looking forward from my station in the supreme moment of the cosmos, I

saw myself, the cosmical mind, sink steadily toward death. But in this

my last aeon, when all my powers were waning, and the burden of my

decaying body pressed heavily on my enfeebled courage, an obscure memory

of past lucidity still consoled me. For confusedly I knew that even in

this my last, most piteous age I was still under the zestful though

remote gaze of the Star Maker.

 

Still probing the future, from the moment of my supreme unwithered

maturity, I saw my death, the final breaking of those telepathic

contacts on which my being depended. Thereafter the few surviving worlds

lived on in absolute isolation, and in that barbarian condition which

men call civilized. Then in world after world the basic skills of

material civilization began to fail; and in particular the techniques of

atomic disintegration and photosynthesis. World after world either

accidentally exploded its little remaining store of matter, and was

turned into a spreading, fading sphere of lightwaves in the immense

darkness; or else died miserably of starvation and cold. Presently

nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of

dust that once were galaxies. Aeons incalculable passed. Little by

little each whiff of dust-grains contracted upon itself through the

gravitational influence of its parts; till at last, not without fiery

collisions between wandering grains, all the matter in each whiff was

concentrated to become a single lump. The pressure of the huge outer

regions heated the center of each lump to incandescence and even to

explosive activity. But little by little the last resources of the

cosmos were radiated away from the cooling lumps, and nothing was left

but rock and the inconceivably faint ripples of radiation that crept in

all directions throughout the ever “expanding” cosmos, far too slowly to

bridge the increasing gulfs between the islanded grains of rock.

 

Meanwhile, since each rocky sphere that had once been a galaxy had been

borne beyond every possible physical influence of its fellows, and there

were no minds to maintain telepathic contact between them, each was in

effect a wholly distinct universe. And since all change had ceased, the

proper time of each barren universe had also ceased.

 

Since this apparently was to be the static and eternal end, I withdrew

my fatigued attention back once more to the supreme moment which was in

fact my present, or rather my immediate past. And with the whole mature

power of my mind I tried to see more clearly what it was that had been

present to me in that immediate past. For in that instant when I had

seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the

very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the

depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet

coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MYTH OF CREATION

 

A WALKER in mountainous country, lost in mist, and groping from rock to

rock, may come suddenly out of the cloud to find himself on the very

brink of a precipice. Below he sees valleys and hills, plains, rivers,

and intricate cities, the sea with all its islands, and overhead the

sun. So I, in the supreme moment of my cosmical experience, emerged from

the mist of my finitude to be confronted by cosmos upon cosmos, and by

the light itself that not only illumines but gives life to all. Then

immediately the mist closed in upon me again.

 

That strange vision, inconceivable to any finite mind, even of cosmical

stature, I cannot possibly describe. I, the little human individual, am

now infinitely removed from it; and even to the cosmical mind itself it

was most baffling. Yet if I were to say nothing whatever of the content

of my adventure’s crowning moment, I should belie the spirit of the

whole. Though human language and even human thought itself are perhaps

in their very nature incapable of metaphysical truth, something I must

somehow contrive to express, even if only by metaphor.

 

All I can do is to record, as best I may with my poor human powers,

something of the vision’s strange and tumultuous after-effect upon my

own cosmical imagination when the intolerable lucidity had already

blinded me, and I gropingly strove to recollect what it was that had

appeared. For in my blindness the vision did evoke from my stricken mind

a fantastic reflex of itself, an echo, a symbol, a myth, a crazy dream

contemptibly crude and falsifying, yet, as I believe, not wholly without

significance. This poor myth, this mere parable, I shall recount, so far

as I can remember it in my merely human state. More I cannot do. But

even this I cannot properly accomplish. Not once, but many times, I have

written down an account of my dream, and then destroyed it, so

inadequate was it. With a sense of utter failure I stammeringly report

only a few of its more intelligible characters.

 

One feature of the actual vision my myth represented in a most

perplexing and inadequate manner. It declared that the supreme moment of

my experience as the cosmical mind actually comprised eternity within

it, and that within eternity there lay a multiplicity of temporal

sequences wholly distinct from one another. For though in eternity all

times are present, and the infinite spirit, being perfect, must comprise

in itself the full achievement of all possible creations, yet mis could

not be unless in its finite, its temporal and creative mode, the

infinite and absolute spirit conceived and executed the whole vast

series of creations. For creation’s sake the eternal and infinite spirit

entails time within its eternity, contains the whole protracted sequence

of creations.

 

In my dream, the Star Maker himself, as eternal and absolute spirit,

timelessly contemplated all his works; but also as the finite and

creative mode of the absolute spirit, he bodied forth his creations one

after the other in a time sequence proper to his own adventure and

growth. And further, each of his works, each cosmos, was itself gifted

with its own peculiar time, in such a manner that the whole sequence of

events within any single cosmos could be viewed by the Star Maker not

only from within the cosmical time itself but also externally, from the

time proper to his own life, with all the cosmical epochs coexisting

together. According to the strange dream or myth which took possession

of my mind, the Star Maker in his finite and creative mode was actually

a developing, an awakening spirit. That he should be so, and yet also

eternally perfect, is of course humanly inconceivable; but my mind,

overburdened with superhuman vision, found no other means of expressing

to itself the mystery of creation.

 

Eternally, so my dream declared to me, the Star Maker is perfect and

absolute; yet in the beginning of the time proper to his creative mode

he was an infant deity, restless, eager, mighty, but without clear will.

He was equipped with all creative power. He could make universes with

all kinds of physical and mental attributes. He was limited only by

logic.

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