d been tossed out in space to burn itself
up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or
bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time
and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to
the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You
might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelee in the
face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set
down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something
all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust
or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any
place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and
all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful
ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is
seething beneath your feet."

It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of
this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,
without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round
swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with
all of us on it, laughing at us.

I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelee broke out. I
went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to
get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all
subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It
was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had
let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground
simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured
the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.
I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming
as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the
fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss
of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and
gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,
both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would
have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race
was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little
ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just
outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, al