My Life and My Ambitions
I live on an island -- not deserted, but an island all the same. The matter of the island -- what it is made of -- extends below an ocean whose tide is rising. I know that someday the ocean will engulf me in a quest which is always for the hindmost air. The material is the result of a fathomless chain of being, extending perhaps to infinity, and of all the modes of the same -- its possibilities and their patterns. What the island is, is one configuration of this ever-changing mass. These configurations, arrangements, possibilities, are so many events, each time they are configured, actualized, arranged. But the surface of the island, itself an event, is, in all its permutations, uneventful. It has to be uneventful, if it is to remain an event. No doubt there are variations in slope, alterations in the soil -- there are valleys and their consequent peaks. But no valley extends so low as the ocean, and no peak rises so far as the stars. The valleys look onto, perhaps slope into, the ocean; the peaks look up at the moon. But that is the extent of things. The varieties of the island are the varieties of my experience, and are only so varied as my experience can be, while it endures. (That is not to say I do not see fanciful projections and injections upon the shores of the lake when the images of true beings are mixed and divided, from which I have formed by rearrangement and conjecture fancies of comets and black holes.) For my neighbors, since I do have neighbors, it is mostly the same. Some of us, it is true, believe that far from the island extends a great mainland, a great empire and its emperor -- that he rules justly -- that he has sent us from afar, and someday will return, tugging us beyond the coastline's reach. Some of us, it is true, believe that the ocean extends and will extend without bound until it engulfs even the faintest stars. Our material is wonderfully extended, but it does not extend so far as these possibilities: no vessel leaves the island, and no vessel returns. So we differ -- but within this difference, we agree. We agree as to the shape of the island. We know which soil is good, and which is bad, and good, and bad, for what. We have had some differences as to who has rights upon the island -- as to where our various parcels of lands, our farms, might lie. But we have always known how to resolve our differences, even if their resolution was our dissolution. We have cast each other into the ocean, it is true, and so we will. But the sea claims everyone, anyway -- and with respect to infinity, all its parts are of little or no account.
My life on the island is, as one hopes life on any island would be, small. I desire no eruptions, even if such chaos might expand my lot. I take what food I find, and with whatever I have left, I feed the birds. I am distracted to amusement, even if it means I sometimes miss a meal while looking upon the surface of some lake at all the differences of light. I feel my sense of duty, which urges me to health, savings, and moderation, in bravery as in sin. If I have any complaint, it is I do not know my neighbors. The rest are stories and dreams.
But these stories and dreams! I walk sometimes to the edge of the ocean, and try to gaze beyond. I extrapolate over the distant waters some chaos of storms, the approach of which I dread. I look off, against the current, to try and glimpse the sloping curve of sails. There are hints that the land across the ocean might exist, or intuitions of disaster. These are, it is true, nothing but feelings, faint as the ripple of the water when it is teased with wind -- dull implications, probabilities. Probability does not much nor long impress; I turn my vision back to things that count -- to me and mine. I work and I while, until the tide comes in.
And I know it is a possibility that when I have become a part of the ocean, when me and mine are claimed, at last, some other man on the mainland or perhaps some other island, if anything else exists, might look upon and to the ocean, where I was, for news of things that were -- that somehow, somewhere, someone might have news of me. But his news of me will be for him as dull and probable as the news I have of them, if they existed or exist. My greatest hope, my greatest survival, must be, balanced upon the dull edge of this probability, this possibility that just as I am cut, so also someone else will be so cut. These approximations are a knife with which, someday, on some rare occasion, still another being might feel as I have felt. It is this living death or dead living, this possibility that I might be for someone else as others had been, once, for me, for which I hope. Because it is the only probability which is so probable, so I feel, as to be possible -- and possible, so I hope, for me.
My life on the island is, as one hopes life on any island would be, small. I desire no eruptions, even if such chaos might expand my lot. I take what food I find, and with whatever I have left, I feed the birds. I am distracted to amusement, even if it means I sometimes miss a meal while looking upon the surface of some lake at all the differences of light. I feel my sense of duty, which urges me to health, savings, and moderation, in bravery as in sin. If I have any complaint, it is I do not know my neighbors. The rest are stories and dreams.
But these stories and dreams! I walk sometimes to the edge of the ocean, and try to gaze beyond. I extrapolate over the distant waters some chaos of storms, the approach of which I dread. I look off, against the current, to try and glimpse the sloping curve of sails. There are hints that the land across the ocean might exist, or intuitions of disaster. These are, it is true, nothing but feelings, faint as the ripple of the water when it is teased with wind -- dull implications, probabilities. Probability does not much nor long impress; I turn my vision back to things that count -- to me and mine. I work and I while, until the tide comes in.
And I know it is a possibility that when I have become a part of the ocean, when me and mine are claimed, at last, some other man on the mainland or perhaps some other island, if anything else exists, might look upon and to the ocean, where I was, for news of things that were -- that somehow, somewhere, someone might have news of me. But his news of me will be for him as dull and probable as the news I have of them, if they existed or exist. My greatest hope, my greatest survival, must be, balanced upon the dull edge of this probability, this possibility that just as I am cut, so also someone else will be so cut. These approximations are a knife with which, someday, on some rare occasion, still another being might feel as I have felt. It is this living death or dead living, this possibility that I might be for someone else as others had been, once, for me, for which I hope. Because it is the only probability which is so probable, so I feel, as to be possible -- and possible, so I hope, for me.