The Blindmans World | Page 5

have no more concern with? But it is no doubt a merciful
provision of Providence that renders you unable to realize the
grotesqueness of your predicament, as it appears to us."
"But the future is eternal!" I exclaimed. "How can a finite mind grasp
it?"
"Our foreknowledge implies only human faculties," was the reply. "It is
limited to our individual careers on this planet. Each of us foresees the
course of his own life, but not that of other lives, except so far as they
are involved with his."
"That such a power as you describe could be combined with merely
human faculties is more than our philosophers have ever dared to
dream," I said. "And yet who shall say, after all, that it is not in mercy
that God has denied it to us? If it is a happiness, as it must be, to
foresee one's happiness, it must be most depressing to foresee one's
sorrows, failures, yes, and even one's death. For if you foresee your
lives to the end, you must anticipate the hour and manner of your
death,--is it not so?"
"Most assuredly," was the reply. "Living would be a very precarious
business, were we uninformed of its limit. Your ignorance of the time
of your death impresses us as one of the saddest features of your
condition."
"And by us," I answered, "it is held to be one of the most merciful."
"Foreknowledge of your death would not, indeed, prevent your dying
once," continued my companion, "but it would deliver you from the
thousand deaths you suffer through uncertainty whether you can safely
count on the passing day. It is not the death you die, but these many
deaths you do not die, which shadow your existence. Poor blindfolded
creatures that you are, cringing at every step in apprehension of the
stroke that perhaps is not to fall till old age, never raising a cup to your

lips with the knowledge that you will live to quaff it, never sure that
you will meet again the friend you part with for an hour, from whose
hearts no happiness suffices to banish the chill of an ever-present dread,
what idea can you form of the Godlike security with which we enjoy
our lives and the lives of those we love! You have a saying on earth,
'To-morrow belongs to God;' but here to-morrow belongs to us, even as
to-day. To you, for some inscrutable purpose, He sees fit to dole out
life moment by moment, with no assurance that each is not to be the
last. To us He gives a lifetime at once, fifty, sixty, seventy years,--a
divine gift indeed. A life such as yours would, I fear, seem of little
value to us; for such a life, however long, is but a moment long, since
that is all you can count on."
"And yet," I answered, "though knowledge of the duration of your lives
may give you an enviable feeling of confidence while the end is far off,
is that not more than offset by the daily growing weight with which the
expectation of the end, as it draws near, must press upon your minds?"
"On the contrary," was the response, "death, never an object of fear, as
it draws nearer becomes more and more a matter of indifference to the
moribund. It is because you live in the past that death is grievous to you.
All your knowledge, all your affections, all your interests, are rooted in
the past, and on that account, as life lengthens, it strengthens its hold on
you, and memory becomes a more precious possession. We, on the
contrary, despise the past, and never dwell upon it. Memory with us, far
from being the morbid and monstrous growth it is with you, is scarcely
more than a rudimentary faculty. We live wholly in the future and the
present. What with foretaste and actual taste, our experiences, whether
pleasant or painful, are exhausted of interest by the time they are past.
The accumulated treasures of memory, which you relinquish so
painfully in death, we count no loss at all. Our minds being fed wholly
from the future, we think and feel only as we anticipate; and so, as the
dying man's future contracts, there is less and less about which he can
occupy his thoughts. His interest in life diminishes as the ideas which it
suggests grow fewer, till at the last death finds him with his mind a
tabula rasa, as with you at birth. In a word, his concern with life is
reduced to a vanishing point before he is called on to give it up. In

dying he leaves nothing behind."
"And the after-death," I asked,--"is there no: fear of that?"
"Surely," was the reply, "it is not necessary