ver being, a
will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland. But this, man will not
accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not
pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it.

"He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water,
prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with
pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises,
and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to
startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his
dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the
gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is
destined to be as free as they--monuments of egotism reared by the
epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer
vanishes and are no more when he is not.

"It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and
mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night.
The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers
of metaphysics. Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way
of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to
tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast
that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same.
Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their
philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would outwit
the Noseless One and the Night.

"Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies,
wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of
words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological
fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms
of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths
of sad mad men and passionate rebels--your Schopenhauers, your
Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches.

"Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget."

I obey, for my brain is now well a-crawl with the maggots of alcohol, and
as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote Richard Hovey:

"Abstain not! Life and Love like night and day
Offer themselves to us on their own terms,
Not ours. Accept their bounty while ye may,
Before we be accepted by the worms,"

"I will cap you," cries the White L