THE SPIRIT OF SCHOPENHAUER |
  Rush on, rush on, humanity, and fill
Your hours with toil-wrought pain. Rush on, rush on
Upon your prizeless race. Where is your gain
In luxury, or seas of swimming gold,
Or starry ether chained to conquerdom?
You do but add new wheels, new chains to man's
Machine to govern man. You build a tower
More high than Babel's, hoping for earthly heaven
Upon this structure formed of luxuries,
And squander here stored-up celestial bliss
Which your poor Wills would mortgage before gained.
Your little lives were never made for racks
And fettered strainings of this new-wrought world
That quivers your nerves with life-intensity.
Death marks your race upon his hour-glass;
And Madness moves upon your city streets.
Your fevered minds reel downward to the gulf
Where knowledge fails, and luxuries lose charm,
Where passion flickers out, and haste seems slow.
Rush on, rush on, destruction marks your goal.
Rush on, rush on, till Death has breathless felled
The last of all your human progeny;
And leaves him lying there alone—alone,
Like him who first had shape of man—unburied,
Lost in a race with no competitor,
And nothing as the goal—unburied, staring
At the passing clouds, his only winding-sheet.
And then the Great Intelligence—if such
There be—will see his moment's pastime o'er,
And turn his arts to other constellations,
Until in rolling Æons e'en his mind
May lose the memory of Man which was—
Rush on, rush on, humanity, and fill
Your hours with toil-wrought pain, rush on, rush on!
Death is your hope, your pilot, and your goal,
And Nothingness your only consolation—
April 26, 1911. |
|
  |
