Oh, foolish, deluded, self-profaning man of time! What will save you from yourself? What will turn you away from this pathetic ferreting about? Must you count all the money in the world, all the dollars and all the cents, all the bills and coins ever issued by all the treasuries in the histories of nations, before you can see the truth? Must you exhaust all the finite inventories in the.universe, and still go on longing, before you realize what it is that you long for? Do you not know that while you are counting, still counting, long before you have neared the end even of this finite set, death will come and take you, and everything will have been for nought, for zero, as if you had never counted the monad that all along stared you in the face?
These are the questions that came to me, then, one slow word at a time, until it appeared to me that the chain I was forging was itself endless and that it could go on longer than I could. For while it is the chain of delusion itself that is infinite, my own delusion was that each finite link was infinite. Had I possessed my coffin during those months of my vain desires, I surely would have seen that each set of desires was a finite set, for I would have seen, as I see now, that each set depended on my personal memories of food and drink and monies in order for me to image any particular member of that set. And when I had seen, by virtue of the grace sacrament provides, that I had been all along experiencing nothing more than the desire that springs from memory, no twisting of scripture would have worked for me to excuse myself. Thus armed, I would have steeled myself against the desire by denigrating the memory and then by turning all my attention to the further contemplation of the dead, who have no memory.
But without my coffin, without access thereby to the sacrament that could have provided grace with ease, I was forced to lengthen the cycle, to add link to link, until at last, no matter how I squirmed and wriggled, I could not deny the evidence that all the links would be the same and endlessly, and that all I was about during these complaining days and dreaming nights was the business of binding myself into time. It was a discovery made possible by intellect, rather than by rite, but it was no less gratuitous for that and thus no less an aspect of the grace that flows from the dead. I fell on my knees, as I do now, and I thanked the unruffled, objective, endlessly uninvolved dead for the freedom to think clearly and thereby to free myself from the bondage of the finite, the chain of life, the links of the desire that springs from memory.
This episode in my spiritual growth marked the end of my weakness for nostalgia. By cleansing myself of my desires for varieties of food, for varieties of drink, and for endless numbers of money, I cleansed myself of the taint of nostalgia. And thus was my growth allowed to continue, where before it had been impeded and had even been thrown backwards so to create a diminishment. It was a painful period in my life, and often a bewildering one, but all that was to make my ultimate freedom from it the more victorious and exemplary.
FOR reasons at first unknown to me, when I was falling regularly into disputes with those prisoners who previously had joined me daily in my complainings, I felt compelled to blame myself. Later I saw that my reasons were natural if not well-founded, for as much as I had made myself come forward after months, even up to a year or possibly more, of complaining and then dreaming and then making specious argument, by that same distance as I had come forward was I regarded by my old associates with mistrust. Now, this is in the nature of things, that when a companion comes forward and leaves you behind, you will bridle at him when he speaks to you and attempts to bring you forward also to stand beside him. You will try to argue that he has fallen away, and he will argue that he has come forward, and so the two of you will fall into dispute.
It was not wholly a legitimate thing for me to do, then, when I proceeded so quickly to blame myself for the disputes, but after all, I was the one who had moved out of step, and I could not think of my movement except as a forward one, and so naturally I could not help but attempt to convince my fellow prisoners to follow me to that place, which place I knew was no more than a quickstep nearer to death. Yet all the same, I knew that if I had not tried so diligently to bring my fellow prisoners to a deeper understanding of the worship of the dead, there would not have been those painful, sometimes frightening disputes and arguments and the numerous sudden flights of irritation. My companions did not want me to leave them, whether by means of a step forward or of a falling away, but once I had done so, they did not want me to try to take them with me.
Yet I had no choice in the matter. It was my calling to make coffins to aid in the further worship of the dead, and in the absence of conditions which would make that activity possible, in order still to practice my calling I was obliged to draw others unto the dead in whatever ways there were available to me, and in this case, at this time, the only means available to me was argument. And so, whenever possible, I met my fellow prisoners with argument and deep reasoning, with intent talk and formal challenge and with careful discussion, bringing my own most complicated and subtle thoughts to bear on the question of the proper place for a human being’s attention, and in the process drawing forth from my fellows their most complicated and subtle thoughts on the question. Thus, if I could not make my fellows a coffin, I would make them some deep and thrilling argument instead. If I could not work for the dead in one way, I would do it in another.
The first of my previous companions to grow weary of my company and to show it to me were those who in the previous winter had got me to dress myself up as a famous actress and go about in the exercise yard where there were many of the simpler prisoners and offer them my autograph, which they excitedly accepted and soon were squabbling over amongst themselves, to the lasting amusement of my companions and also to me at that time, although later it seemed to me a pointless and even slightly cruel thing to do, and I was ashamed of myself for having done it. But after I had gone through my long winter and spring of complaining and griping and fantasizing and rationalizing, and eventually had come to know myself in this matter, then I could no longer join these fellows in their play and their jokes on the other prisoners. I was forced to refuse them on several occasions, first when they came to me and invited me to join them in their attempt to trick up some of the exercise equipment in the gymnasium so that the bigger, athletic men would be likely to fall and hurt themselves when they began to exercise, and then a few weeks later when they wanted me to help them decorate the dining hall for a Mayday masquerade party. I thought both activities wrong headed, the first because it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury and the second because the celebration of the first day of the month of May was a deliberate carry over from the days when it had not yet been thought of to worship the dead and men and women went around year after year making holidays out of seasonal and celestial cycles and changes which they foolishly associated with the patterns and needs of their own mortal lives. The amnesty associated with the solstice and applied every year to the short-term prisoners and the tried and convicted political and religious offenders willing to sue out a pardon, as they called it, was a celebration of this type. Possibly this amnesty was one of the reasons why Mayday, too, was regarded as such a significant holiday in the prison. I could not say for sure, but when I offered my reasons, as described above, for not wishing to participate in the preparations for the masquerade party associated with the holiday, I was told by one of the celebrants that soon the amnesty would be made, and then all the prisoners in his group, and here he waved his hand in a circle to indicate to me his many friends, would be gone out of prison and would be lost to one another forever. Some of them even had wives, he said to me, as if this were a sad thing, and many of them would be obliged to go back and make their residences far from one another all across the nation. Thus, he said, Mayday was an important holiday for them.