s to light the world. And there came into my
head some words: 'And the darkness comprehended it not.' When I waked
up, I found the words in the Bible, but that night it seemed to me they
were said for the first time. The boy must remember Billy Jones was in
all this. He was the chief part of it. As to the words, it was as if
Billy Jones said them. I was in the darkness, and I was to be made to
comprehend. And when I looked lower through the darkness--and I cannot
tell how, but I seemed to be in it and yet at the same time I was above
it, so that I looked down and saw what was going on--I saw multitudes of
men and women, trying to get through it. Sometimes they walked slowly,
as if it was hard to walk, and sometimes they jostled each other and
sometimes stopped to push one another about, and sometimes when some
were down the others stamped on them. But they were all going somewhere,
and it was toward the light. And as I say, I was in the darkness though
I could see through it, and I wondered if I was going, too.

"And then I understood. I couldn't tell the boy how I understood, not if
he was here to ask me; but it was as if a voice spoke and told me in two
or three words, and few as they were, I took them in and I knew. Perhaps
there was a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of Billy Jones. There is no
reason why not. The minute after he got out of his body, he might have
known everything: I don't mean everything, I mean the one thing that
would explain it all. And he had a kindness for me, and if he learned
anything that smoothed out his trouble and turned it into joy, he would
want me to know, too. And this is it, though now I have got to the place
for telling it, I don't know how. It is like a dream. You have to tell
it the minute you wake, or it is gone. I saw that creation had been a
long time going on. I saw that although we have minds to think with, we
haven't really, in comparison with the things to be thought out. I saw
that we are so near the dust that we can no more account for the ways of
Almighty God than the owl hooting out there in the woods can read the
words I am writing here. I saw that nothing is to be told us. We are to
find out everything for ourselves, just as we have found electricity and
the laws of physics. And poisons--we have found out those, some of them,
even if we had to die to do it. And God lets us die trying to find out.
He doesn't care anything about our dying. And if He doesn't care
anything