forty great wagons across a desolate and hostile land,
and I was not at all interested in what came of the mangy hermit with his
rock-roweled ribs and stinking water-skin. And I gained back, neither to
Nephi nor the Nile, but to--

But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to explain a
few things and make the whole matter easier to your comprehension. This
is necessary, because my time is short in which to complete my jacket-
memoirs. In a little while, in a very little while, they are going to
take me out and hang me. Did I have the full time of a thousand
lifetimes, I could not complete the last details of my jacket
experiences. Wherefore I must briefen the narrative.

First of all, Bergson is right. Life cannot be explained in intellectual
terms. As Confucius said long ago: "When we are so ignorant of life, can
we know death?" And ignorant of life we truly are when we cannot explain
it in terms of the understanding. We know life only phenomenally, as a
savage may know a dynamo; but we know nothing of life noumenonally,
nothing of the nature of the intrinsic stuff of life.

Secondly, Marinetti is wrong when he claims that matter is the only
mystery and the only reality. I say and as you, my reader, realize, I
speak with authority--I say that matter is the only illusion. Comte
called the world, which is tantamount to matter, the great fetich, and I
agree with Comte.

It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different
from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion. Life persists.
Life is the thread of fire that persists through all the modes of matter.
I know. I am life. I have lived ten thousand generations. I have lived
millions of years. I have possessed many bodies. I, the possessor of
these many bodies, have persisted. I am life. I am the unquenched spark
ever flashing and astonishing the face of time, ever working my will and
wreaking my passion on the cloddy aggregates of matter, called bodies,
which I have transiently inhabited.

For look you. This finger of mine, so quick with sensation, so subtle to
feel, so delicate in its multifarious dexterities, so firm and strong to
crook and bend or stiffen by means of cunning leverages--this finger is
not I. Cut it off. I live. The body is mutilated. I am not mutilated.
The spirit that is I is whole.

Very well. Cut off all my fingers. I am I. The spirit is entire. Cut
off both hands. C