led-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail.
I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying
since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which
is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does
not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes for
life. But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one
afraid. The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely
into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria
of living.
I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and
infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon
opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the
beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is
murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living, piping
for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air.
I return across the ranch. Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are
out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life. Here is
no morality. Only in man is morality, and man created it--a code of
action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth.
Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness. These
were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget;
the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously,
and played with gently, oh! so gently, as sleeping dogs at the back of
consciousness which I did not care to waken. I did but stir them, and
let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them. But now
White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for White Logic, most valiant,
is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream.
"Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me," White Logic whispers as
I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat
me. They say I make for death. What of it? It is truth. Life lies in
order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad
dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and
flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are
ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse,
permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that
always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as
othe
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