Towards democracy

Towards Democracy 17

XI

HE scene changes ; the sun and the stars are veiled, the solid earth alone is left. I am buried (I too that I may rise again) deep underfoot among the clods.

Each one a transparent miracle, competent with man and his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations—but for me they are only dirt.

Level wastes of sand and scrub; mudflats by the mouths of rivers; old disheveled rocks and oozy snow; trickling slime-places and ponds and bogs and mangrove marshes and chattering shale-slopes and howling deserted ridges and heaps of broken glass and old bones and shoes and pots and pans in blind alleys and fogs along flat shores and crimes

- betrayals murders thefts respectability, bad smells by house

doors, filthy-smelling interiors of factories and drawing-rooms, stale scents, gas, dirt, evil faces, drunkenness, cruelty to

animals, and the cruelty of animals to each, other This is the solid earth in the midst of which I am buried.

O I am mad! the lightning flashes on evil raw places, I stretch uneasily in my grave and tumble the towers of great cities with my feet; the volcanos lurch and spill their molten liquor.

I hate those nearest me, and am closed, captious and intolerant. I sweep a great space round me and sulk in the middle of it.