disintegrate? My molecules would scatter all around and
take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry
its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new
estate, but where should I be? I should not have a rag of a feeling
left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. Nothing to think
with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair
with. There would be no more me. I should be musing and thinking and
dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a
cat--by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other
creatures--a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still
another child of Nature--heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or
something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some
lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details
would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it,
it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in
it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by
molecule, as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed,
and nothing left of what had once been Me. It is curious, and not
without impressiveness: I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so
scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead--no, one cannot
call it that--but I should be the next thing to it. And to think
what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the
disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away!
I wish I knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a
weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by
one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the
ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these
horrors, and let me think of something wholesome!

My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years
longer--500,000 of my microbe years. So may it be.

Oh, dear, we are all so wise! Each of us knows it all, and knows he
knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows
there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high
tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is
best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the
next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only
true on