Charles W. Sanders - "Sanders' Union Fourth Reader"

Ben Jonson - "Sejanus: His Fall"

Rudyard Kipling - "Verses 1889 1896"

Clarence Day Jr. - "This Simian World"

Time and Change

J >> John Burroughs >> Time and Change




In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with things at first
hand, and you get a rule, a standard, that serves you through life.
You are dealing with primal sanities, primal honesties, primal
attraction; you are touching at least the hem of the garment with
which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes out from it to you.
It must be added that you are dealing with primal cruelty, primal
blindness, primal wastefulness, also. Nature works with reference to
no measure of time, no bounds of space, and no limits of material.
Her economies are not our economies. She is prodigal, she is
careless, she is indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavishes
with one hand, she gathers in with the other. She is blind, yet she
hits the mark because she shoots in all directions. Her germs fill
the air; the winds and the tides are her couriers. When you think
you have defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her laws
that you reach your end.

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant our seeds and hoe
our crops by some sort of system. Can any one tell how many hundreds
of millions of years Nature has been making ready her garden and
planting her seeds?

There can be little doubt, I think, but that intercourse with Nature
and a knowledge of her ways tends to simplicity of life. We come
more and more to see through the follies and vanities of the world
and to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves up with so many
false burdens, our complex civilization breeds in us so many false
or artificial wants, that we become separated from the real sources
of our strength and health as by a gulf.

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce
my baggage, to lop off superfluities. I become more and more in love
with simple things and simple folk--a small house, a hut in the
woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor of great houses,
elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me.
They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a false
standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of
character and thought. A man needs a good roof over his head winter
and summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The
more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, and
the longer he will live.

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does take the conceit out
of us! How we dwindle to mere specks and our little lives to the
span of a moment in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the
interstellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband our time! A year,
a month, a day, an hour may mean so much to us. Behold the infinite
leisure of Nature!

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what matters it to the
Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be billions of years older than the
earth. They are evidently yet passing through that condition of
cloud and vapor and heat that the earth passed through untold aeons
ago, and they will not reach the stage of life till aeons to come.
But what matters it? Only man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite
time. When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless long have
been a dead world. It may continue a dead world for aeons longer
before it is melted up in the eternal crucible and recast, and set
on its career of life again.

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in the
physical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober and
safeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds
and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away from Nature, or
only studying her through religious fears and superstitions, what a
mess a large body of mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of
the obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which has so often
taken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has been
an eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of the
clock! It is not many years since a college professor published a
book figuring out, from some old historical documents and
predictions, just the year in which the great mundane show would
break up. When I was a small boy at school in the early forties,
during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of all
mundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event was
expected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into
a great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let down
a curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side of
the valley. "There it comes!" they said, and their tears flowed
copiously. I remember that I did not share their fears, but watched
the cloud, curious as to what the end of the world would be like. I
cannot brag, as Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around the
corner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure my curiosity would
get the better of me and that I should go, even at this late day. Or
think of the more harmless obsession of many good people about the
second coming of Christ, or about the resurrection of the physical
body when the last trumpet shall sound. A little natural knowledge
ought to be fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows us
how transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting
the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other
aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone.
Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure
antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic views of the universe.




V



I was struck by this passage in one of the recently published
letters of Saint-Gaudens: "The principal thought in my life is that
we are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to something
higher (on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, whatever it
is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, and to bear up at times
against what seems to be the Great Power that is over us, the
practice of love, charity, and courage are the great things."

The "Great Power" that is over us does seem unmindful of us as
individuals, if it does not seem positively against us, as
Saint-Gaudens seemed to think it was.

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways. Our standards of
prudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, of
failure--how far off they seem from the scale upon which the
universe is managed or deports itself! If the earth should be blown
to pieces to-day, and all life instantly blotted out, would it not
be just like what we know of the cosmic prodigality and
indifference? Such appalling disregard of all human motives and ends
bewilders us.

Of all the planets of our system probably only two or three are in a
condition to sustain life. Mercury, the youngest of them all, is
doubtless a dead world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace
temperature on the other. But what matters it? Whose loss or gain is
it? Life seems only an incident in the universe, evidently not an
end. It appears or it does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay?
The asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet between Mars and
Jupiter. Some force which no adjective can describe or qualify blew
it into fragments, and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge
rocks making their useless rounds in the light of the sun forever
and ever. What matters it to the prodigal All? Bodies larger than
our sun collide in the depths of space before our eyes with results
so terrific that words cannot even hint them. The last of these
collisions--of this "wreck of matter and crush of worlds"--reported
itself to our planet in February, 1901, when a star of the twelfth
magnitude suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude and
then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the independent
existence of two enormous celestial bodies. They apparently ended in
dust that whirled away in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by
the winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn leaves. It
would be quite in keeping with the observed ways of the Eternal, if
these bodies had had worlds in their train, teeming with life, which
met the same fate as the central colliding bodies.

Does not force as we know it in this world go its own way with the
same disregard of the precious thing we call life? Such long and
patient preparations for it,--apparently the whole stellar system in
labor pains to bring it forth,--and yet held so cheaply and
indifferently in the end! The small insect that just now alighted in
front of my jack-plane as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced
to a faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the fate of man
before the unregarding and unswerving terrestrial and celestial
forces. The great wheels go round just the same whether they are
crushing the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all one
to the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are for us or against us
indifferently. And yet the earth is here, garlanded with the seasons
and riding in the celestial currents like a ship in calm summer
seas, and man is here with all things under his feet. All is well in
our corner of the universe. The great mill has made meal of our
grist and not of the miller. We have taken our chances and have won.
More has been for us than against us. During the little segment of
time that man has been upon the earth, only one great calamity that
might be called cosmical has befallen it. The ice age of one or two
hundred thousand years was such a calamity. But man survived it. The
spring came again, and life, the traveler, picked itself up and made
a new start. But if he had not survived it, if nothing had survived
it, the great procession would have gone on just the same; the gods
would have been just as well pleased.

The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet. This is the
order of nature. No matter for the rest, for the weak, the slow, the
unlucky, so that the fight is won, so that the race of man
continues. You and I may fail and fall before our time; the end may
be a tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some one must
succeed, will succeed.

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of forces, the
influences that made for life have been in the ascendant. This
conflict of forces has been a part of the process of our
development. We have been ground out as between an upper and a
nether millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have actually
arrived, and are all the better for the grinding--all those who have
survived. But, alas for those whose lives went out in the crush!
Maybe they often broke the force of the blow for us.

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound,
measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees
with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in the end
is not this best? Could the universe be run as a charity or a
benevolent institution, or as a poor-house of the most approved
pattern? Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law,
where should we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; but
rocks are hard too, yet they form the foundations of the hills.

Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he
pays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the
vast social and civic organizations that were impossible without
these things.

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, as
all other forms of life will end. But the potential man will
continue and does continue on other spheres. One cannot think of one
part of the universe as producing man, and no other part as capable
of it. The universe is all of a piece so far as its material
constituents are concerned; that we know. Can there be any doubt
that it is all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible
forces and capabilities are concerned? Can we believe that the earth
is an alien and a stranger in the universe? that it has no near kin?
that there is no tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other
planets and systems? Are the planets not all of one family, sitting
around the same central source of warmth and life? And is not our
system a member of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still
larger, all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size is
nothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only red corpuscles in the
arteries of the infinite. If man has not yet appeared on the other
planets, he will in time appear, and when he has disappeared from
this globe, he will still continue elsewhere.

I do not say that he is the end and aim of creation; it would be
logical, I think, to expect a still higher form. Man has been man
but a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-
four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will be gone;
less than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all life
from the earth will be gone. What then? The game will be played over
and over again in other worlds, without approaching any nearer the
final end than we are now. There is no final end, as there was no
absolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite.

THE END

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