erse over
our heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of
absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when
we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at
strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To
suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose
that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express
anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.

We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of
everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do
our living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves
with--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and
football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them
from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey
anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying
on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense
and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a
new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,
to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the
beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could
not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more
futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul
than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may
be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a
failure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical
instruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a
black stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen
solemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked
under his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing
and crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of
the violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated
enough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and
important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy
of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that
can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing
could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a
tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celeb