THE EQUINOX
can hardly realize that one, or any one else, can ever have
been in such a silly muddle. It seems so perfectly natural
that everything should be just as it is, and so right, that one
is quite startled if one contemplates the nature of one’s Star,
which led one into these “grave paths.” The only “wrong”
is the thinking about anything at all; this is of course the
old “Thought is evil” on a higher plane. One gets to un-
derstand the Upanishad which tells us how The Original It
made the error of contemplating itself, of becoming self-
conscious; and one also perceives the stupendous transcen-
dentalism concealed in the phrase of the Book of the Law:
“Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!” This
Universe—the IO PAN PAN and the OIMOI TALAINOI
too—is a Play of Our Merry Lady. It is as natural to have
all this heavy stuff about the Weary Pilgrim’s Bleeding
Feet, and the Candidate for Woe, and all that, as it is for
Theseus and Hippolyta to decide that Pyramus and Thisbe
may amuse them. The Public will then kindly excuse the
Magus if He be of a nature, and in a mood, to decline to take
the tragedy too seriously, and to mock the crude buffooneries
of Bottom. Perhaps it would be better taste in Him to
draw the curtains of His box. But it is at least His pleasure
to reward the actors. Love is the law, love under will.”
85. Alas! when once thou hast become like the pure snow
in mountain vales, cold and unfeeling to the touch, warm and
protective to the seed that sleepeth deep beneath its bosom—
*tis now that snow which must receive the biting frost, the
northern blasts, thus shielding from their sharp and cruel
tooth the earth that holds the promised harvest, the harvest
that will feed the hungry.
126