To live is a continuous humiliation

To live is a continuous humiliation. Man was born with the desire to be free, yet everywhere he is in the hopeless shackles of mortality and of iron natural law. If Lucifer was proud, he was not so proud as I: it wounds my self-esteem not to be able to perform miracles, to move mountains, to play fast and loose with base clay, to be in direct telepathic rapport with the universe and its beauty. No one more than I could be readier to listen eagerly and encouragingly to the claims of Spiritualists and Christian Scientists. These claims do not surprise me. What does surprise me is that, as touching miracles, the evidence still seems to be on the side of David Hume. I ask myself, “What is the secret of the universe?” and I am staggered to find that I do not know. What an amazing thing it is that no one knows. “Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,” yet is man “successive unto nothing but patrimony of a little mould and entail of four planks.” That bumble-bee in the fox-glove yonder — how can I be about my human business until I know? Who is going to be busied over anything at all so long as overhead the sun shines unmolested and underneath his feet, secure in mystery, grows a single blade of grass? To be alive is so incredible that I can no more than lie still on my back between the immense vertical heights of my ignorance like a newborn babe sunk in the grand canon of Colorado. In the embrace of this mother Sphinx the earth, my own individuality shrinks to vanishing-point, I see myself through the wrong end of a telescope — a tiny speck crawling on a great hill.

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” (Pascal.)

W. N. P. Barbellion 

April 11, 1915