第69章

But if I had my life to live over again, I think I should go in for silence, and get as near to Nirvana as I could.This language is such a paltry tool! The handle of it cuts and the blade doesn't.

You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a word, and send out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up other people's difficulties.It always seems to me that talk is a ripple and thought is a ground swell.A string of words, that mean pretty much anything, helps you in a certain sense to get hold of a thought, just as a string of syllables that mean nothing helps you to a word; but it's a poor business, it's a poor business, and the more you study definition the more you find out how poor it is.Do you know Isometimes think our little entomological neighbor is doing a sounder business than we people that make books about ourselves and our slippery abstractions? A man can see the spots on a bug and count 'em, and tell what their color is, and put another bug alongside of him and see whether the two are alike or different.And when he uses a word he knows just what he means.There is no mistake as to the meaning and identity of pulex irritans, confound him!

--What if we should look in, some day, on the Scarabeeist, as he calls himself?--said I.---The fact is the Master had got agoing at such a rate that I was willing to give a little turn to the conversation.

--Oh, very well,--said the Master,--I had some more things to say, but I don't doubt they'll keep.And besides, I take an interest in entomology, and have my own opinion on the meloe question.

--You don't mean to say you have studied insects as well as solar systems and the order of things generally?

--He looked pleased.All philosophers look pleased when people say to them virtually, "Ye are gods." The Master says he is vain constitutionally, and thanks God that he is.I don't think he has enough vanity to make a fool of himself with it, but the simple truth is he cannot help knowing that he has a wide and lively intelligence, and it pleases him to know it, and to be reminded of it, especially in an oblique and tangential sort of way, so as not to look like downright flattery.

Yes, yes, I have amused a summer or two with insects, among other things.I described a new tabanus,--horsefly, you know,--which, Ithink, had escaped notice.I felt as grand when I showed up my new discovery as if I had created the beast.I don't doubt Herschel felt as if he had made a planet when he first showed the astronomers Georgium Sidus, as he called it.And that reminds me of something.

I was riding on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Windsor in the year--never mind the year, but it must have been in June, Isuppose, for I bought some strawberries.England owes me a sixpence with interest from date, for I gave the woman a shilling, and the coach contrived to start or the woman timed it so that I just missed getting my change.What an odd thing memory is, to be sure, to have kept such a triviality, and have lost so much that was invaluable!

She is a crazy wench, that Mnemosyne; she throws her jewels out of the window and locks up straws and old rags in her strong box.

[De profundis! said I to myself, the bottom of the bushel has dropped out! Sancta--Maria, ora pro nobis!]

--But as I was saying, I was riding on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Windsor, when all at once a picture familiar to me from my New England village childhood came upon me like a reminiscence rather than a revelation.It was a mighty bewilderment of slanted masts and spars and ladders and ropes, from the midst of which a vast tube, looking as if it might be a piece of ordnance such as the revolted angels battered the walls of Heaven with, according to Milton, lifted its muzzle defiantly towards the sky.Why, you blessed old rattletrap, said I to myself, I know you as well as Iknow my father's spectacles and snuff-box! And that same crazy witch of a Memory, so divinely wise and foolish, travels thirty-five hundred miles or so in a single pulse-beat, makes straight for an old house and an old library and an old corner of it, and whisks out a volume of an old cyclopaedia, and there is the picture of which this is the original.Sir William Herschel's great telescope! It was just about as big, as it stood there by the roadside, as it was in the picture, not much different any way.Why should it be? The pupil of your eye is only a gimlet-hole, not so very much bigger than the eye of a sail-needle, and a camel has to go through it before you can see him.You look into a stereoscope and think you see a miniature of a building or a mountain; you don't, you 're made a fool of by your lying intelligence, as you call it; you see the building and the mountain just as large as with your naked eye looking straight at the real objects.Doubt it, do you? Perhaps you'd like to doubt it to the music of a couple of gold five-dollar pieces.If you would, say the word, and man and money, as Messrs.Heenan and Morrissey have it, shall be forthcoming; for I will make you look at a real landscape with your right eye, and a stereoscopic view of it with your left eye, both at once, and you can slide one over the other by a little management and see how exactly the picture overlies the true landscape.We won't try it now, because I want to read you something out of my book.

--I have noticed that the Master very rarely fails to come back to his original proposition, though he, like myself, is fond of zigzagging in order to reach it.Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess-board in their way of moving.One mind creeps from the square it is on to the next, straight forward, like the pawns.