The World's Wonders

Being now three or four years more than sixty,

I have seen strange things in my time. I have seen a merman

standing waist-deep in the ocean off my rock shore,

Unmistakably human and unmistakably a sea-beast: he sub-

merged and never came up again,

While we stood watching. I do not know what he was, and

I have no theory: but this was the least of wonders.

I have seen the United States grow up the strongest and

wealthiest of nations, and swim in the wind over bank-

ruptcy.

Ihave seen Europe, for twenty-five hundred years the crown

of the world, become its beggar and cripple.

I have seen my people, fooled by ambitious men and a froth

of sentiment, waste themselves on three wars.

None was required, all futile, all grandly victorious. A fourth

is forming.

I have seen the invention of human flight; a chief desire of

man's dreaming heart for ten thousand years;

And men have made it the chief of the means of massacre.

I have seen the far stars weighed and their distance meas-

ured, and the powers that make the atom put into service-

For what? - To kill. To kill half a million flies - men I

should say - at one slap.

I have also seen doom. You can stand up and struggle or lie

down and sleep - you are doomed as Oedipus.

A man and a civilization grow old, grow fatally - as we say

- ill: courage and the will are bystanders.

It is easy to know the beauty of inhuman things, sea, storm

and mountain; it is their soul and their meaning.

Humanity has its lesser beauty, impure and painful; we

have to harden our hearts to bear it.

I have hardened my heart only a little: I have learned that

happiness is important, but pain gives importance.

The use of tragedy: Lear becomes as tall as the storm he

crawls in; and a tortured Jew became God.