Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays by Timothy Titcomb
page 114 of 263 (43%)
page 114 of 263 (43%)
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familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within
sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes, more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and brooding eternity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they are great particularly because they are large. They are above me, and they lead me upward toward creative infinity. If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,--the elements which compose it, the relations of those elements to each other, the mode of their combination--I am lost as readily as I should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first, indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude--using it as a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They belong to a life and are the servants of instincts which I do not understand at all. These thoughts come to me, borne by certain memories. I know a |
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