Strange To Say,
The Bigness Of The Distinct Blocks Of Stones Was The First Sign By
Which I Attained To Feel The Immensity Of The Whole Pile.
When I
came, and trod, and touched with my hands, and climbed, in order
that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then,
and almost suddenly, a cold sense and understanding of the
Pyramid's enormity came down, overcasting my brain.
Now try to endure this homely, sick-nursish illustration of the
effect produced upon one's mind by the mere vastness of the great
Pyramid. When I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of
three and five years old), being then of delicate health, I was
often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental
oppression. I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open
eyes, but without power to speak or to move, and all the while my
brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and
abstract idea, the idea of solid immensity. It seemed to me in my
agonies that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming
upon me without form or shape, that the close presence of the
direst monster ever bred in hell would have been a thousand times
more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size. My aching mind
was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness,
vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest with it any
particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have
ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I
could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics,
and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an
abstract idea) - I could not of course find words to describe the
nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is
that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from
matter, should be so terrible. Well, now my eyes saw and knew, and
my hands and my feet informed my understanding that there was
nothing at all abstract about the great Pyramid - it was a big
triangle, sufficiently concrete, easy to see, and rough to the
touch; it could not, of course, affect me with the peculiar
sensation which I have been talking of, but yet there was something
akin to that old nightmare agony in the terrible completeness with
which a mere mass of masonry could fill and load my mind.
And Time too; the remoteness of its origin, no less than the
enormity of its proportions, screens an Egyptian Pyramid from the
easy and familiar contact of our modern minds; at its base the
common earth ends, and all above is a world - one not created of
God, not seeming to be made by men's hands, but rather the sheer
giant-work of some old dismal age weighing down this younger
planet.
Fine sayings!
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