Names Were Nothing To Him; All He Had To
Do Was To Whirl His Scarlet Spots About In The Brilliant Sun, Rest When
He Liked, And Go On Again.
I wonder whether it is a joy to have bright
scarlet spots, and to be clad in the purple and gold of life; is the
colour felt by the creature that wears it?
The rose, restful of a dewy
morn before the sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in
its own fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The
rose sleeps in its beauty.
The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself with
sunlight, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the grass and
sun; he does not heed them at all - and that is why he is so happy-any
more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there, or why it does
not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he lives without
thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a hundred hours long,
still it would not be long enough. No, never enough of sun and sliding
shadows that come like a hand over the table to lovingly reach our
shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells sweet as a flower, not if
we could live years and years equal in number to the tides that have
ebbed and flowed counting backwards four years to every day and night,
backward still till we found out which came first, the night or the day.
The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing of the names of the grasses that
grow here where the sward nears the sea, and thinking of him I have
decided not to wilfully seek to learn any more of their names either.
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