Lewis Carroll
After a minute or two he began again. “If I’m
not wearying you, I would like to tell you an idea of
the future Life which has haunted me for years, like a
sort of waking nightmare--I ca’n’t reason myself
out of it.”
“Pray do,” Arthur and I replied, almost in a breath. Lady Muriel
put aside the heap of music, and folded her hands together.
“The one idea”,
the Earl resumed, “that has seemed to me to overshadow
all the rest, is that of Eternity -- involving,
as it seems to do, the necessary exhaustion of
all subjects of human interest. Take Pure Mathematics,
for instance -- a Science independent of our present surroundings.
I have studied it, myself, a little. Take the subject
of circles and ellipses -- what we call ‘curves of
the second degree’. In a future Life, it would only
be a question of so many years (or hundreds of
years, if you like) for a man to work out all their
properties. Then he might go to curves of the
third degree. Say that took ten times as long
(you see we have unlimited time to deal with).
I can hardly imagine his interest in the subject
holding out even for those; and, though there is no limit
to the degree of the curves he might study, yet
surely the time, needed to exhaust all the novelty
and interest of the subject, would be absolutely finite?
And so of all other branches of Science. And, when I transport
myself, in thought, through some thousands or millions
of years, and fancy myself possessed of as much Science
as one created reason can carry, I ask myself ‘What
then? With nothing more to learn, can one rest content
on knowledge, for the eternity yet to be lived
through?’ It has been a very wearying thought to
me. I have sometimes fancied one might, in that event,
say ‘It is better not to be’, and pray
for personal annihilation -- the Nirvana of the
Buddhists.”
“But that is
only half the picture,” I said. “Besides working
for oneself, may there not be the helping of
others?”
”Surely, surely!” Lady Muriel exclaimed in a
tone of relief, looking at her father with sparkling eyes.
“Yes,”
said the Earl, “so long as there were any
others needing help. But, given ages and ages more, surely
all created reasons would at length reach the same dead
level of satiety. And then what is there
to look forward to?”
“I know that
weary feeling,” said the young Doctor. “I have
gone through it all, more than once. Now let me tell you
how I have put it to myself. I have imagined a little
child, playing with toys on his nursery-floor, and yet
able to reason, and to look on, thirty years
ahead. Might he not say to himself ‘By that time
I shall have had enough of bricks and ninepins. How weary
Life will be!’ Yet, if we look forward through those
thirty years, we find him a great statesman, full of interests
and joys far more intense than his baby-life could give
-- joys wholly inconceivable to his baby-mind -- joys
such as no baby-language could in the faintest degree
describe. Now, may not our life, a million years hence,
have the same relation, to our life now, that the man’s
life has to the child’s? And, just as one might try,
all in vain, to express to that child, in the language
of bricks and ninepins, the meaning of ‘politics’,
so perhaps all those descriptions of Heaven, with its
music, and its feasts, and its streets of gold, may be
only attempts to describe, in our words, things
for which we really have no words at all. Don’t
you think that in your picture of another life,
you are in fact transplanting that child into political
life, without making any allowance for his growing up?”
“I think I understand
you,” said the Earl. “The music of Heaven may
be something beyond our powers of thought. Yet the music
of Earth is sweet! Muriel, my child, sing us something
before we go to bed!”
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