Limanora the island of progress
of forming their resolution, it was the natural habit of these tame
triflers with death to put all the energy they had into their tongues.
As long as they could talk heroics to anyone about the deed they
contemplated, they were certain not to accomplish it. And romantic
chatter is catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and in
the young who had robuster wills, the results might be more prompt.
It was different with the death-scenes of men and women who had done
their duty by the race and by human progress, and had worked out the
best possible results from the yoking of higher and lower energies.
Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower forms. It was not
the languor of the loftier element in them, but the exhaustion of
the lower, that brought the nausea of their hybrid life. They could
feel, as they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual energy
had risen since their entrance into earthly existence. Every year had
seen them climb upwards; nearer and nearer had their inner energy come
towards touch with that divine medium which was in and yet above all
life and which in youth they were conscious of only in lofty moments
of inspiration. Such were the supreme ascensions of life, when they
were capable of the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves.
These moments became more and more frequent as they grew older and more
progressive, till towards the close of life they were almost habitual.
Limanoran youth snatched at these supernal moments by the help of
imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these moral altitudes
that lay far above mere passion or instinct. It was the old amongst
them who were alone capable of great creative spiritual life. They
seemed to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe, and
gave the impulses to most spiritual advance.
Here and there in other civilisations was bred a nature that had
fitful consciousness of this divine medium, at times through great
creative imagination, but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is
spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it has come into
communication with the most refined and most creative medium of the
universe, that through which what we call the divine seems to work;
but only through patient self-moulding and development has it reached
such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past ages these natures have
found shelter in religion; for in the world ambition must make use of
the coarsest tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and the
growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and noble aspiration
stifled. Peace and the shadow of devotional thought were the only
conditions allowing such a nature any scope in a world based upon war
and guided in its search for the right by might alone.
It was different with Limanoran civilisation. There it was the rule,
and not the exception, to raise the spiritual energies to sympathy
with the diviner media of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the
pursuit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, but it grew
more continuous and surer. The young could scarcely distinguish its
impulses from those of their own lower energies. But the old had seldom
any hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed to keep in
touch with all that is divine in the world. They needed no retreat,
no religious shelter, to nurse the magnetic sympathy with the divine.
Their affinity to it grew more and more the essence of their being,
without ever having to leave their daily routine of duties. It was this
that gave them their wisdom and character, and that made the young feel
them to be almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They became
more distinct and striking in their personality as they grew older and
felt this affinity. It had come to be a common observation of daily
life that the nobler the aspirations and the closer the intercourse
with the ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more distinctive
was the character; and science was not far from the conclusion that on
this intercourse depended persistence of individuality, and that the
higher they reached in their sympathies with the more refined media of
the universe, the less need was there of change in their personality
at death, of making alliance with other lower energies when they shed
their inferior and earthly forms of energy.
There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in their
old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the
human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above
the demands of their corporeal energies rather than in them or by them.
In the young the two seemed blended together; it was difficult often
to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But
in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealised, it
seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down;
it bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison
with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived,
the stronger the contrast became, till at last nature herself seemed
to demand their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in
the development of Limanoran life came to be not so much a privilege
as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with
the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the
evolution of the life. Even the family, who would feel the bereavement
most in the loss of their wise help and guidance, acquiesced gladly,
feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the released
spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used the music
of creation; they gave utterance to their feeling that death was not
dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was an
advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or
degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal
farewell; for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the
noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life.
CHAPTER IV
AN EPIDEMIC
THOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I
could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the
hill of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it haunted
my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got
into the habit of winging my exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was
there with Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and music.
There were we together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew
on Lilaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of
the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for
the hegira of earth-weary souls. No such launching-ground was there
for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure
moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much
an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a
forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight; and
the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the
mind, disappeared.
As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk of it and make
much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel and my proparents alone did
I discuss its varied aspects; I could listen by the hour to their
teachings. But it brought me into intercourse with many whom I had
scarcely seen before except in the course of my education as I wandered
through the various halls. I was astonished to find how often they
sought opportunity to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had
important business with me, and confidentially imparted their views
of death which I had heard a hundred times from others, until I grew
weary of their chatter, for I wished to talk myself. But they would
not allow me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble; even
Thyriel could not endure my interruptions. Though I never grew weary of
her talk, I could not restrain the desire to have my say, too. There
was no subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, but we
preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most joyous of topics.
And every other youth was just as eager to deliver his opinions to me
and to everybody else. However busy they might be with the task in
hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which soon spun itself
into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs and the most enduring tongue.
Everyone seemed to comport himself as if his views were of the utmost
importance to the world. They all seemed bursting with the obvious;
out it must come or they would die. In every other corner I would find
two or three debating with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most
confidential whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their topic
trite and stale as last year’s gossip; the speaker was pressing home
on his hearers in a voice of portentous awe what no one would think of
disputing.
The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to stop this tempest
of loquacity. Hurrying from post to post they tried to keep the young
at their work, but it was an endless task. On would go the glib current
as soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters began to
look serious, for the work of the community was being neglected. The
ordinary services of life were barely performed. Little or no progress
could be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became manifest
that the main aim of the race, progress, would soon be forgotten, and
retrogression supervene. The faces of the elders became graver every
day; their advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Babble,
babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk, as if the island
had been in the midst of Western civilisation. When I closed my eyes
so loud and empty sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself
back again in my native land, and believe that I had dreamt my recent
years and wakened again in Christendom.
The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked
as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something
must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its
train,--vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The
torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day and seemed to have
broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilisation. No one
was capable of stopping it either by precept or example.
At last in their despair the elders appealed to the medicants. Nothing
like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest;
nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it
since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical
inspection, the medicants made a more minute investigation of the
systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left
side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of
speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid
secretion in the brain-tissue of this region; in most cases nothing
out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So
they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most
of them, and when they put these under their strongest clirolans, it
became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition.
The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track
of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms
of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly
under the inspection of the medicants. Moving electrographs of the
thought-processes in the diseased parts were taken daily by means of
modifications of the lavolan; and under still more powerful clirolans,