es), but I cannot help being
conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first
thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it
might be overdoing things a little.

I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men
and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I
know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be
lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in
immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I
were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting
out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that
wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier
and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how
long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure
in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and
had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest
preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is
only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have
the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality
I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this
very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United
States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I
feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to
an infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying
to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging
Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it
sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to
His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,
and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal
throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his
sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a
petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel
as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.

I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was
asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great
blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed
out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of
light--had dwind