Here Am
I, A Little Animal Called A Man - A Bit Of Vitalized Matter, One
Hundred And Sixty-Five Pounds Of Meat And Blood, Nerve, Sinew,
Bones, And Brain, - All Of It Soft And Tender, Susceptible To Hurt,
Fallible, And Frail.
I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose
of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken.
I put my
head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall
twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of
temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and
toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin
blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few
additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go
out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I
cease to move - for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a
rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal
blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life - it is all I
am. About me are the great natural forces - colossal menaces, Titans
of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me
than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have
no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are
unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and
tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal
waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies,
earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts
and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing
humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death - and
these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature,
all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who
himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.
In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty
Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way. The bit of life
that is I will exult over them. The bit of life that is I, in so
far as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its
service, will imagine that it is godlike. It is good to ride the
tempest and feel godlike. I dare to assert that for a finite speck
of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling
than for a god to feel godlike.
Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave. Here are the seas, the
winds, and the waves of all the world. Here is ferocious
environment. And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of
which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I. I like.
I am so made. It is my own particular form of vanity, that is all.
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