Boyne,
near Clonard, Meath, when workmen were raising gravel.

That one, at least, had been dropped there.

12

Astronomy.

And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a street's been
torn up.

There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the
neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire
somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs--

The watchman and his one little system.

Ethics.

And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very "select"
seminary.

Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness, murder--

Excluded.

The prim and the precise, or the exact, the homogeneous, the single, the
puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have illusion
of this state--but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a
drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by
the negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive
is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our
acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or
pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts
to realize or to become real--because it is feeling that realness has
been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the attitude of
the sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of
acceptance; to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over,
amounts to paltriness and puerility of scientific dogmas and standards.
Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one
be under the delusion that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a
resistance to the progress of the others.

So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system--

But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and
worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds
linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in
hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material
like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric
super-constructions made of iron and steel--

Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke and charcoal
and oily substances that suggest fuel--but the masses of iron that have
fallen upon this earth.

Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constr