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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
like
the model of a ship such as sailors make and put into glass bottles.
There was no caprice, no chance. All was law. It was in obedience to
law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the same law that
fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed and put out legs and wings and
become a bird.
Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and here
he was at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things were laying
their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension. At night,
asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the
day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon
the world he had just discovered. At table he failed to hear the
conversation about petty and ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out
and following cause and effect in everything before him. In the meat on
the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back through all
its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or traced
its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to
cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to
cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
brain. He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
"Bughouse," whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sisters face,
nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbothams finger, whereby he
imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in his brother-in-laws head.
What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation of
knowledge--of all knowledge. He had been curious to know things, and
whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments in
his brain. Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store. On
the subject of woman he had a fairly large store. But these two subjects
had been unrelated. Between the two memory compartments there had been
no connection. That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any
connection whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner
carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown him not only
that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for there to be no
connection. All things were related to all other things from the
farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the
grain of sand under ones foot. This new concept was a perpetual
amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing
the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side
of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was
unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them
all--kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,
rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,
illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and
tobacco. Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it,
or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified
traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but
observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to know.
And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the universe, and
life, and his own life in the midst of it all.
"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass. "You wanted to
write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write about.
What did you have in you?--some childish notions, a few half-baked
sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance,
a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love
and as futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to write! Why, youre
just on the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about. You
wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about
the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew
nothing of the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to write
about the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
puzzle Martin Eden page 51 Martin Eden page 53 |