IN THESE days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.
My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once—green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness—it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.
I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.
Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?
It may be.
But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.
And so then I shall remember it.
As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.
It is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.
In my intensest desires—in my widest longings—I never go beyond self. The ego is the all.
Limitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.
But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.
I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.
To be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it, but to vanquish it, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!
Perhaps a woman—a real woman—could do this.
But I?—No. I am not real—I do not seem real to myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.
There was Charlotte Corday—a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she had her agony. It was for love of her fair country.
To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday's soul now!
And I—with all my manifold passions—I am a coward.
I have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me,—when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities. While they lasted—what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?
But they are not real.
They fade away—they fade away.
And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.
Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!
"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces."
I do not know what to do.
I do not know what were good to do.
I would do nothing if I knew.
I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me—from myself.