I feel, as if some heavy object were pressing down on me. My head is covered with something black and fearful. Above, there is no sky, only layer upon layer of some dark and opressive matter. Where does this feeling come from?
At times I feel like a lamp over the gate of a house, lit before sundown. The dim, orange light burns helplessly behind the blue frosted glass, waiting for the dark to give it brightness. Wait passively, that is all I can do. But this light wants desperately to burst into flame and burn everything around it. It does not want to remain so feeble, a prisoner behind the frosted glass. If only a storm would come and smash the glass, and let the flame reach up to the wooden eaves and envelop all in its fiery arms.
I must start working seriously. I live and work as though I were in a tight box, I feel so constrainted. I must learn to feel free, free to do what I want with a sense of purpose and comfort and generosity. I want to walk with a firm step, swinging my arms, not with such timidity and purposelessness as I do now. I mustn't hurry, but I mustn't stop. and I can't be like the feeble light wishfully waiting for the coming of the storm.
I must not seek peace in resignation. I must not throw away anything, I must not give in, I must find peace and satisfaction in having always tried. There is no death for anyone who has done something that is immortal. I do not mean only those in the arts---not any more---but scientists as well. I don't know much about the Curies. But I am sure that no matter what fate befalls them, what they have done for mankind will always give them the strenght to survive, a peace of mind and satisfaction hat no accident can touch. I want to have that peace of mind, that comfort. I want to see what no one else has seen, I want to hear what no one else has heard, I want to feel as no one else has felt.
I do not want to think that the fate that awaits this planet will neccessarily determine the fate of mankind. The other animals do not know what fate will befall our planet. Only man knows, and only man fights against it. And behind his instinctive, insatiable ambition is this blind will to resist his fate. The conscious part of man acknowledges the inevitability of his end. But this blind will in him completely refuses to do so.
Man progressed as earth's condition improved, as it became more congenial to him. And when earth's condition at last begins gradually to worsen, as earth becomes colder and drier, so will man begin to decline; and then, with the death o he very last, solitary human being on earth, our race will come to its end. Not only man, but all other species, too, will become extinct one by one, and all our remains will lie buried under the ice. This is no wild fancy. All living things will as a matter of course meet this dreadful, inescapable fate. But will man---this nervous, struggling creature so committed to progress almost without purpose---ever learn to accept such a fate obediently? Perhaps he will. Perhaps when the condition of this planet has deteriorated and man himself has become a lesser creature, when our descendants gaze without sympathy or understanding upon the strange, useless things that their ancestors had built---at what cost these creatures will never know---perhaps then, man, now without mind or hope, will passively accept his end. But until such time, he will continue his search, perhaps in the name of progress, for a way to forestall his doom.
Women bear children and men do their chosen work. This constitutes human life. In primitive times, all that a man had to do was work for the happiness of his own immediate family or of his village. Then gradually the notion of the tribe was extended until in Japan it came to be the feudal domain. And later this was replaced by the nation, which in turn was extended to include the race, then finally to mankind at large.
Our notion of immortality, too, undergoes a similar process of extension. As children we care only about our own individual, bodily immortality; that is the only kind that has any emotional meaning for us then. (And even now I dread death.) Bu as we grow, our own personal immortality comes to have less and less meaning. We come to have no faith in it. Insead we seek satisfaction in the work we do, hoping that at least will remain, hoping that though we as individuals will die, our own species will continue forever. Perhaps we may eventually reach a point when we are delivered from this hope. There are indeed faiths in which such deliverance is offered. Be that as it may, men instinctively strive for progress no matter what they do. Often, this strife becomes a blind obsession, the end becomes forgotten, and what is reapec in the name of progress is unhappiness for mankind. But no matter what the result may be, the driving force behind this strife is the desire for immortality for the human race, the terrible need to deny the inevitability of its fate. I remember the day when for the first time in Japan an airplane was flown. The pilot's name was Marse. As I watched the plan taxiing along the ground, then suddenly rise into the air, I found myself moved almost to tears. Where did this emotion come from? I suppose the excitement of the crowd around me was partly responsible. But there was something besides that. After all, I have not been equally moved when all alone I have read accounts in the newspaper of great scientific discoveries? And I think that at such times, it is the human will within me, hidden from my consciousness, that is responding.
We all know that mankind will eventually disappear. But this knowledge does not bring despair to our daily lives. Sometimes, it is true, when we contemplate the destiny of the human race, we may feel unbearably forlorn. But this forlornness is the kind we feel when we think about infinity. The strange thing is that while we recognize the inevitability of man's extinction, we ignore it emotionally. And the desperate struggle for progress continues. Is this not because somewhere in us is the hope that man may somehow escape the destiny of this very planet? And is there not some great subconscious will at work in all of us, the will that this hope shall be realized?
Tokitō Kensaku.
How to thank such generosity?
