In The Desert, An Old Monk Had

After Chiding The Theologian For His Reliance On Myth And Miracle, Science Found Itself In The Unenviable Position Of Having To Create Mythology Of Its Own: Namely, The Assumption That What, After Long Effort, Could Not Be Proved To Take Place Today Had, In Truth, Taken Place In The Primeval Past.

Animals Are Molded By Natural Forces They Do Not Comprehend. To Their Minds There Is No Past And No Future. There Is Only The Everlasting Present Of A Single Generation, Its Trails In The Forest, Its Hidden Pathways In The The Air And In The Sea. There Is Nothing In The Universe More Alone Than Man. He Has Entered Into The Strange World Of History.

What If I Am, In Some Way, Only A Sophisticated Fire That Has Acquired An Ability To Regulate Its Rate Of Combustion And To Hoard Its Fuel In Order To See And Walk?

Over The Whole Earth- This Infinitely Small Globe That Possesses All We Know Of Sunshine And Bird Song- An Unfamiliar Blight Is Creeping: Man- Man, Who Has Become At Last A Planetary Disease And Who Would, If His Technology Yet Permitted, Pass This Infection To Another Star.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.