The Story of My Heart
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Richard Jefferies >> The Story of My Heart
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These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every human being whose
body has been racked by pain; from every human being who has suffered from
accident or disease; from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by
negligence, there goes up a continually increasing cry louder than the
thunder.
An awe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listen to,
against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstition and the wax of
criminal selfishness:--These miseries are your doing, because you have mind
and though, and could have prevented them. You can prevent them in the
future. You do not even try.
It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception are
preventable, or, if not so, that they can be so weakened as to
do no harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents are
preventable; there is not one that does not arise from folly or
negligence. All accidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain
that all human beings are capable of physical happiness. It is
absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human
being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is
incontrovertible that there is no necessity for any man to die
but of old aoe, and that if death cannot be prevented life
can be prolonged far beyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible
that at the present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one single person
ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is no such thing as a
natural cause of death. They die of disease or weakness which is the result
of disease either in themselves or in their ancestors. No such thing as old
age is known to us. We do not even know what old age would be like, because
no one ever lives to it.
Our bodies are full of unsuspected flaws, handed down it may be
for thousands of years, and it is of these that we die, and not
of natural decay. Till these are eliminated, or as nearly
eliminated as possible, we shall never even know what true old
age is like, nor what the true natural limit of human life is.
The utmost limit now appears to be about one hundred and five
years, but as each person who has got so far has died of weaknesses
inherited through thousands of years, it is impossible to say to what number
of years he would have reached in a natural state. It seems more than
possible that true old age--the slow and natural decay of the body apart
from inherited
flaw--would be free from very many, if not all, of the petty
miseries which now render extreme age a doubtful blessing. If
the limbs grew weaker they would not totter; if the teeth
dropped it would not be till the last; if the eyes were less
strong they would not be quite dim; nor would the mind lose its
memory.
But now we see eyes become dim and artifical aid needed in comparative
youth, and teeth drop out in mere childhood.
Many men and women lose teeth before they are twenty. This simple fact is
evidence enough of inherited weakness or flaw. How could a person who had
lost teeth before twenty be ever said to die of old age, though he died at a
hundred and ten? Death is not a supernatural event; it is an event of the
most materialistic character, and may certainly be postponed, by the united
efforts of the human race, to a period far more distant from the date of
birth than has been the case during the historic period. The question has
often been debated in my mind whether death is or is not wholly preventable;
whether, if the entire human race were united in their efforts to eliminate
causes of decay, death might not also be altogether eliminated.
If we consider ourselves by the analogy of animals, trees, and
other living creatures, the reply is that, however postponed,
in long process of time the tissues must wither. Suppose an ideal man, free
from inherited flaw, then though his age might
be prolonged to several centuries, in the end the natural body
must wear out. That is true so far. But it so happens that the analogy is
not just, and therefore the conclusions it points to are not tenable.
Man is altogether different from every other animal, every other living
creature known. He is different in body. In his purely natural state--in his
true natural state--he is immeasurably stronger. No animal approaches to the
physical perfection of which a man is capable. He can weary the strongest
horse, he can outrun the swiftest stag, he can bear extremes of heat and
cold hunger and thirst, which would exterminate every known living thing.
Merely in bodily strength he is superior to all. The stories of antiquity,
which were deemed fables, may be fables historically, but search has shown
that they are not intrinsically fables. Man of flesh and blood is capable
of all that Ajax, all that Hercules did. Feats in modern days have surpassed
these, as when Webb swam the Channel; mythology contains nothing equal to
that. The difference does not end here. Animals think to a certain extent,
but if their conceptions be ever so clever, not having hands they cannot
execute them.
I myself maintain that the mind of man is practically infinite.
It can understand anything brought before it. It has not the
power of its own motion to bring everything before it, but when
anything is brought it is understood. It is like sitting in a
room with one window; you cannot compel everything to pass the
window, but whatever does pass is seen. It is like a magnifying glass, which
magnifies and explains everything brought into its focus. The mind of man is
infinite. Beyond this, man has a soul. I do not use this word in the common
sense which circumstances have given to it. I use it as the only term to
express that inner consciousness which aspires. These brief reasons show
that the analogy is imperfect, and that therefore, although an ideal
animal--a horse, a dog, a lion--must die, it does not follow that an ideal
man must. He has a body possessed of exceptional recuperative powers, which,
under proper conditions, continually repairs itself. He has a mind by which
he can select remedies, and select his course and carefully restore the
waste of tissue. He has a soul, as yet, it seems to me, lying in abeyance,
by the aid of which he may yet discover things now deemed supernatural.
Considering these things I am obliged by facts and incontrovert-ible
argument to conclude that death is not inevitable to the ideal man. He is
shaped for a species of physical immortality. The beauty of form of the
ideal human being indicates immortality--the contour, the curve, the outline
answer to the idea of life. In the course of ages united effort long
continued may eliminate those causes of decay which have grown up in ages
past, and after that has been done advance farther and improve the natural
state. As a river brings down suspended particles of sand, and depositing
them at its mouth forms a delta and a new country; as the air and the rain
and the heat of the sun desiccate the rocks and slowly wear down mountains
into sand, so the united action of the human race, continued through
centuries, may build up the ideal man and woman.
Each individual labouring in his day through geological time in front must
produce an effect. The instance of Sparta, where so much was done in a few
centuries, is almost proof of it.
The truth is, we die through our ancestors; we are murdered by our
ancestors. Their dead hands stretch forth from the tomb and drag us down to
their mouldering bones. We in our turn are now at this moment preparing
death for our unborn posterity. This day those that die do not die in the
sense of old age, they are slain. Nothing has been accumulated for our
benefit in ages past. All the labour and the toil of so many millions
continued through such vistas of time, down to those millions who at this
hour are rushing to and fro in London, has
accumulated nothing for us. Nothing for our good. The only things that have
been stored up have been for our evil and destruction, diseases and
weaknesses crossed and cultivated and rendered almost part and parcel of our
very bones. Now let us begin to roll back the tide of death, and to set our
faces
steadily to a future of life. It should be the sacred and sworn duty of
every one, once at least during lifetime, to do something in person towards
this end. It would be a delight and pleasure to me to do something every
day, were it ever so minute. To reflect that another human being, if at a
distance of ten thousand years from the year 1883, would enjoy one hour's
more life, in the sense of fulness of life, in consequence of anything I had
done in my little span, would be to me a peace of soul.
CHAPTER X
UNITED effort through geological time in front is but the beginning of an
idea. I am convinced that much more can be done, and that the length of time
may be almost immeasurably shortened. The general principles that are now in
operation are of the simplest and most elementary character, yet they have
already made considerable difference. I am not content with these. There
must be much more--there must be things which are at present unknown by
whose aid advance may be made. Research proceeds upon the same old lines and
runs in the ancient grooves. Further, it is restricted by the
ultra-practical views which are alone deemed reasonable. But there should be
no limit placed on the mind. The purely ideal is as worthy of pursuit as the
practical, and the mind is not to be pinned to dogmas of science any more
than to dogmas of superstition. Most injurious
of all is the continuous circling on the same path, and it is
from this that I wish to free my mind.
The pursuit of theory--the organon of pure thought--has led
incidentally to great discoveries, and for myself I am convinced
it is of the highest value. The process of experiment has produced much, and
has applied what was previously found.
Empiricism is worthy of careful re-working out, for it is a fact
that most things are more or less empirical, especially in
medicine. Denial may be given to this statement, nevertheless
it is true, and I have had practical exemplification of it in my
own experience. Observation is perhaps more powerful an organon
than either experiment or empiricism. If the eye is always watching, and
the mind on the alert, ultimately chance supplies the solution.
The difficulties I have encountered have generally been solved
by chance in this way. When I took an interest in
archaeological matters--an interest long since extinct--I
considered that a part of an army known to have marched in a
certain direction during the Civil War must have visited a town
in which I was interested. But I exhausted every mode of
research in vain; there was no evidence of it. If the knowledge
had ever existed it had dropped again. Some years afterwards,
when my interest had ceased, and I had put such inquiries for
ever aside (being useless, like the Egyptian papyri), I was
reading in the British Museum. Presently I returned my book to
the shelf, and then slowly walked along the curving wall lined with volumes,
looking to see if I could light on anything to amuse me. I took out a volume
for a glance; it opened of itself at a certain page, and there was the
information I had so long sought--a reprint of an old pamphlet describing
the visit of the army to the town in the Civil War. So chance answered the
question in the course of time.
And I think that, seeing how great a part chance plays in human affairs, it
is essential that study should be made of chance; it seems to me that an
organon from experiment. Then there is the inner consciousness--the
psyche--that has never yet been brought to bear upon life and its questions.
Besides which there is a super-sensuous reason. Often I have argued with
myself that such and such a course was the right one to follow, while in the
intervals of thinking about it an undercurrent of unconscious impulse has
desired me to do the reverse or to remain inactive.
Sometimes it has happened that the supersensuous reasoning has been correct,
and the most faultless argument wrong. I presume this supersensuous
reasoning, preceeding independently in the mind, arises from preceptions too
delicate for analysis. From these considerations alone I am convinced that,
by the aid of ideas yet to be discovered, the geological time in front may
be immeasurably shortened. These modes of research are not all. The
psyche--the soul in me--tells me that there is much more, that these are
merely beginnings of the crudest kind.
I fully recognise the practical difficulty arising from the ingrained,
hereditary, and unconscious selfishness which began before history, and has
been crossed and cultivated for twelve thousand years since. This renders me
less sanguine of united effort through geological time ahead, unless some
idea can be formed to give a stronger impulse even than selfishness, or
unless the selfishness can be utilised. The complacency with which the mass
of people go about their daily task, absolutely
indifferent to all other considerations, is appalling in its
concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong--they intend rightly: in
truth, they work against the entire human race.
So wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so
stolid and so complacent under the immense weight of misery, so callous to
its own possibilities, and so grown to its chains, that I almost despair to
see it awakened. Cemeteries are often placed on hillsides, and the white
stones are visible far off. If the whole of the dead in a hillside cemetery
were called up alive from their tombs, and walked forth down into the
valley, it would not rouse the mass of people from the dense pyramid of
stolidity which presses on them.
There would be gaping and marvelling and rushing about, and what then? In a
week or two the ploughman would settle down to his plough, the carpenter to
his bench, the smith to his anvil, the
merchant to his money, and the dead come to life would be
utterly forgotten. No matter in what manner the possibilities
of human life are put before the world, the crowd continues as stolid as
before. Therefore nothing hitherto done, or suggested, or thought of,is of
much avail; but this fact in no degree
stays me from the search. On the contrary,the less there has been
accomplished the more anxious I am; the truth it teaches is
that the mind must be lifted out of its old grooves before anything will be
certainly begun. Erase the past from the mind--stand face to face with the
real now--and work out all anew. Call the soul to our assistance; the soul
tells me that outside all the ideas that have yet occurred there are others,
whole circles of others.
I remember a cameo of Augustus Caesar--the head of the emperor is graven in
delicate lines, and shows the most exquisite proportions. It is a balanced
head, a head adjusted to the calmest intellect. That head when it was living
contained a circle of ideas, the largest, the widest, the most profound
current in his time. All that philosophy had taught, all that practice,
experiment, and empiricism had discovered, was familiar to him. There was no
knowledge in the ancient world but what was accessible to the Emperor of
Rome. Now at this day there are amongst us heads as finely proportioned as
that cut out in the cameo. Though these living men do not possess arbitrary
power, the advantages of arbitrary power--as far as knowledge is
concerned--are secured to them by education, by the printing-press, and the
facilities of our era. It is reasonable to imagine a head of our time filled
with the largest, the widest, the most profound ideas current in the age.
Augustus Caesar, however great his intellect, could not in that balanced
head have possessed the ideas familiar enough to the living head of this
day. As we have a circle of ideas unknown to Augustus Caesar, so I argue
there are whole circles of ideas unknown to us. It is these that I am so
earnestly desirous of discovering.
For nothing has as yet been of any value, however good its intent. There is
no virtue, or reputed virtue, which has not
been rigidly pursued, and things have remained as before. Men
and women have practised self-denial, and to what end? They
have compelled themselves to suffer hunger and thirst; in
vain. They have clothed themselves in sack cloth and lacerated the flesh.
They have mutilated themselves. Some have been scrupulous to bathe, and some
have been scrupulous to cake their bodies with the foulness of years. Many
have devoted their lives to assist others in sickness or poverty. Chastity
has been faithfully observed, chastity both of body and mind.
Self-examination has been pursued till it ended in a species of sacred
insanity, and all these have been of no more value than the tortures
undergone by the Indian mendicant who hangs himself up by a hook through his
back. All these are pure folly.
Asceticism has not improved the form, or the physical well-being, or the
heart of any human being. On the contrary, the hetaira is often the warmest
hearted and the most generous. Casuistry and self-examination are perhaps
the most injurious of all the virtues, utterly destroying independence of
mind. Self-denial has had no result, and all the self-torture of centuries
has been thrown away. Lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly
wasted. Everything is in vain. The circle of ideas we possess is too
limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as ours are
outside those that were pondered over by Augustus Caesar.
The most extraordinary spectacle, as it seems to me, is the vast
expenditure of labour and time wasted in obtaining mere subsistence. As a
man, in his lifetime, works hard and saves money, that his children may be
free from the cares of penury and may at least have sufficient to eat,
drink, clothe, and roof them, so the generations that preceded us might, had
they so chosen, have provided for our subsistence. The labour and time of
ten generations, properly directed, would sustain a hundred generations
succeeding to them, and that, too, with so little self-denial on the part of
the providers as to be scarcely felt. So men now, in this generation, ought
clearly to be laying up a store, or, what is still more powerful, arranging
and organising that the generations which follow may enjoy comparative
freedom from useless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent
improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve
thousand years ago, and our children's children will still have to toil and
slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed an extraordinary
spectacle.
That twelve thousand written years should have elapsed, and the
human race--able to reason and to think, and easily capable of
combination in immense armies for its own destruction--should still live
from hand to mouth, like cattle and sheep, like the animals of the field and
the birds of the woods; that there should not even be roofs to cover the
children born, unless those children labour and expend their time to pay for
them; that there should not be clothes, unless, again,time and labour are
expended to procure them; that there should not be even food for the
children of the human race, except they labour as their fathers did twelve
thousand years ago; that even water should scarce be accessible to them,
unless paid for by labour! In twelve thousand written years the world has
not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for
its own
comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder with which it fills
me. And more wonderful still, if that could be,
there are people so infatuated, or, rather, so limited of view,
that they glory in this state of things, declaring that work
is the main object of man's existence--work for subsistence--
and glorying in their wasted time. To argue with such is impossible; to
leave them is the only resource.
This our earth this day produces sufficient for our existence.
This our earth produces not only a sufficiency, but a
superabundance, and pours a cornucopia of good things down upon
us. Further, it produces sufficient for stores and granaries to
be filled to the rooftree for years ahead. I verily believe
that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for
thirty. Why, then, have we not enough? Why do people die of
starvation, or lead a miserable existence on the verge of it?
Why have millions upon millions to toil from morning to evening
just to gain a mere crust of bread? Because of the absolute
lack of Organisation by which such labour should produce its
effect, the absolute lack of distribution, the absolute lack even of the
very idea that such things are possible.
Nay, even to mention such things, to say that they are possible, is criminal
with many. Madness could hardly go farther.
That selfishness has all to do with it I entirely deny. The
human race for ages upon ages has been enslaved by ignorance and
by interested persons whose object it has been to confine the
minds of men, thereby doing more injury than if with infected
hands they purposely imposed disease on the heads of the people. Almost
worse than these, and at the present day as injurious, are those persons
incessantly declaring, teaching, and
impressing upon all that to work is man's highest condition.
This falsehood is the interested superstition of an age
infatuated with money, which having accumulated it cannot even
expend it in pageantry. It is a falsehood propagated for the
doubtful benefit of two or three out of ten thousand, It is the
lie of a morality founded on money only, and utterly outside and
having no association whatever with the human being in itself.
Many superstitions have been got rid of in these days; time it is that this,
the last and worst, were eradicated.
At this hour, out of thirty-four millions who inhabit this
country, two-thirds--say twenty-two millions--live within thirty
years of that abominable institution the poorhouse. That any
human being should dare to apply to another the epithet "pauper" is, to me,
the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be
committed. Each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth
and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who
are injured, and it is not the "pauper"--oh, inexpressibly wicked word!--it
is the well-to-do, who are the criminal classes.
It matters not in the least if the poor be improvident, or drunken, or evil
in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable right of
every child born into the light. If the world does not provide it
freely--not as a grudging gift but as a right, as a son of the house sits
down to breakfast--then is the world mad. But the world is not mad, only in
ignorance--an interested ignorance, kept up by strenuous exertions, from
which infernal darkness it will, in course of time, emerge, marvelling at
the past as a man wonders at and glories in the light who has escaped from
blindness.
CHAPTER XI
This our earth produces not only a sufficiency a superabundance, but in one
year pours a cornucopia of good things forth, enough to fill us for many
years in succession. The only reason we do not enjoy it is the want of
rational organisation. I know, of course, and all who think know, that some
labour or supervision will always necessary, since the plough must travel
the furrow and the seed must must be sown; but I maintain that a tenth,
nay, a hundredth, part of the labour and slavery now gone through will be
sufficient, and that in the course of time, as organisation perfects itself
and discoveries advance, even that part will diminish. For the rise and fall
of the tides alone furnish forth sufficient power to do automatically all
the labour that is done on the earth. Is ideal man, then, to be idle? I
answer that, if so, I see no wrong, but a great good. I deny altogether that
idleness is an evil, or that it produces evil, and I am well aware why the
interested are so bitter against idleness--namely, because it gives time for
thought, and if men had time to think their reign would come to an end.
Idleness--that is, the absence of the necessity to work for subsistence--is
a great good.
I hope succeeding generations will be able to be ideal. I hope that
nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their
days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may
rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink.
I will work towards that end with all my heart. If employment they must
have--and the restlessness of the mind will insure that some will be
followed--then they will find scope enough in the perfection of their
physical frames, in the expansion of the mind, and in the
enlargement of the soul. They shall not work for bread, but for
their souls. I am willing to divide and share all I shall ever have for this
purpose, though I think the end will rather be gained by organisation than
by sharing alone.
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