~ Dylan Thomas
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There was
once – so long ago that it makes no sense to think about – a young man who
resolved not to die.
The name of this young man does not matter,
for names are paltry, mutable things, with neither power nor meaning beyond the
flickering moments in which they exist, when they are spoken or written or
thought about. And names mean less and less as one passes through the mists of
time; there will come to pass when even the once-greatest name will mean
nothing at all.
This young man was born like anyone else,
in a city by the edge of a great desert, a city already old then, and now so
long vanished that not even a breath of memory of its existence still endures.
But it was a splendid city once, with towering walls and great avenues, and
great houses where wise men gathered and debated over knowledge so arcane that
none of them could agree on where it all came from.
And as he grew, to manhood, the boy saw
that those around him, his grandparents and his parents’ friends and even some
of his own playmates, grew old or fell ill, or had accidents and died. And
sometimes someone would go out into the desert sands, and never come back
again, and perhaps a wandering caravan would find a withered corpse among the
shifting dunes. And the boy made a decision, that, whatever happened, he would never die.
Everyone whom he talked to laughed at him,
even his own parents. “If you’re born,” they said, “you have to die. To think
otherwise is foolishness.”
“I’ll go to the wise men,” he declared.
“I’ll go to them, where they sit debating in the great houses, and I will ask
them about it, for it must be possible.” And, shutting his ears to their
laughter, he went to the great houses where the wise men sat talking over their
lore from ages past.
“We cannot let such as you in,” the
gatekeepers said, crossing their halberds in his path. “Only the wisest of
sages and the most learned can enter these doors.”
“I seek to know the path to evading death,”
the young man replied. “If you can tell me the way to gain this knowledge, then
do so, or stand aside and let me pass.” And the guards, hearing this, moved
aside and lifted their weapons and allowed him to enter.
Then he reached the great rooms where the
learned men with their big turbans and long beards sat with their scrolls and
tablets, waving their arms and all talking at the same time, and he asked them
his question. And they looked at him as if they had not understood a word he’d
said.
So he asked them again: “I wish to know the
way to achieve immortality, for I do not want to die. And since you, my lords,
are the wisest of all men in the great wide world, I charge you to tell me.”
And the learned sages looked at each other
with consternation and turned back to the young man. “There is no such thing,”
they said. “If you are born, you have to die. That is the eternal truth.”
“Stay with us, and we can teach you of the flow
of time and memory, and the secrets of the tides and the stars,” some of them
said. “We can tell you of the meaning of the flight of birds, and the way to a
woman’s true love, and of the lore of the gods.”
“But you cannot tell me of the way to live
forever,” he reminded them.
“No,” they admitted. “That, we cannot do.”
Then the young man turned away from them,
for he saw that they knew nothing important. And he went back down to the city.
Then, as he was passing the city gates, he
saw an old, old beggar, who looked as ancient as Time itself, and he stopped to
ask his question, for it seemed to him that the venerable man might know of the
secret.
The aged beggar blinked at him out of
rheumy eyes. “Child,” he said, “I am scarcely a century old, and that is
nothing even compared to the stones that form the city around us. I cannot tell
you the secret.”
“But I must know it,” the young man said.
“There must be a way to beat death.”
Then the old man pointed out through the
city gate and at the desert. “Even these stones,” he said, “are here for a
blink of an eye indeed, compared to the sands of the desert. Yesterday they
were not here, and tomorrow they will be gone. But the desert will still be
there, and the winds will blow the dunes over this fair city’s bones.”
“Very well then,” the young man said. “I
will seek my answer from the desert.” Passing through the gates, he trudged
into the desert sands, without a look behind him at all he was leaving behind
forever.
And he walked out into the desert, and
listened to the wind on the sand, which made voices. And the sand told him
stories, many stories, of towns and temples which had once raised their heads
above the dunes, and which were now dust. It told of mighty rivers which had
long since turned to wisps of vapour in the dun-coloured wastes, and of kings
and armies whose feet had trod it, of caravans bearing jewels and silks, gold
and spices, which had crossed it in times so long gone by that no book recorded
their memories. And it told of even older tales, of times when even the desert
was young. But it did not tell him what he wanted to know.
So he asked it then, “What can you tell me
about how to evade death? For that is what I wish to know, not the tales of
those who have succumbed to it in your bosom.”
And the sands rustled and shifted, and
finally an answer came.
“The desert does not know aught of
immortality. But if you walk east across the dunes, straight towards the rising
sun, you will eventually find a mountain which reaches to the sky. At the foot
of that mountain, you will see a hut made of sun dried brick where there had
once been an oasis and now there is none. In that hut you will find one who is
not fully alive, but is not yet one of the dead. Ask her, and she may be able
to give you your answer.”
So, without spending further time listening
to the voices of the sands, the young man struck out across the desert in the
direction of the rising sun. Days passed, and then more days, and he became
thin and sunburnt as the desert itself. Even more days passed around him, until
he felt he had become one of the drifting grains of sand. And still he walked
on.
And then at last he came to the mountain at
whose foot was the dried up oasis, by the side of which a hut of crumbling
bricks hunched like a the shell of a long dead tortoise. There he found
something so wizened and shrivelled that he could not be certain whether it
still lived. But he remembered what the desert had said, and bowed deep before
the thing.
“Old Mother,” he said, “I come seeking the
secret of immortality. And I am certain that you, who are so old that even the
desert defers to you, can tell me of it.”
And the old thing bent her skeletal head. “Although I am old,” she said, in a
voice like the memory of a whisper borne away by the wind, “I am only a child
compared to the world, and the sun and moon and stars. But go you to the top of
that mountain, which was old and the world was young, and you will find, at its
very peak, an opening to the depths of the earth. Perhaps there you will find
your answer.”
The young man thanked her and was about to
leave, when she raised a hand as insubstantial as a dried twig. “Remember this,
young man,” she said, “that I have not gone up to the mountain top, for I have
no desire to live forever. Even my own life, long as it has been, is
intolerable to me.”
“Why is that, Old Mother?” the young man
asked.
“Think of what immortality means,” the
ancient woman whispered. “Everything you know, all you ever loved, will fade
away. If you hold a woman in your arms, tomorrow she will be a memory, and the
children she bears you will be a memory the day after. Even the very nation
that you were born into, the mountains and rivers you knew, will ultimately crumble
away to dust. And if you get to know and love a new world, it will pass swiftly
in its turn, and leave you weary with grief and despair.”
“But all that will happen anyway,” the
young man said, “whether one evades death or not, one’s friends and lovers will
fade away and die, and the only way one can avoid that is to die before they
do. Thank you, Old Mother, but I will go to the mountain.”
“If you are so determined,” she whispered, “then
I will not try to turn you from your way.”
So, bowing to her, the young man began
climbing the mountain. It was a long and weary climb, and the stones were sharp
and jagged enough to rip his skin through his clothes, so that he painted the
rocks with his blood, and still he climbed on. The nights were so cold that he
felt as though the mountain would be split apart, and he with it, and he
cowered in whatever crevice he could find for shelter. But the morning came, as
always, and he climbed on.
And it came that he was so high that it
seemed to him that he could see the entire desert, even to the city he had left
so long ago, but still he climbed. Great birds with beaks of iron flew around
him and serpents with fangs dripping poison coiled on the stones at high noon,
and they hissed at him when he drew near; but he ignored them all and passed
on. He climbed until he felt as though he could touch the moon as she floated
by, and pluck the stars out of the sky, and still the mountain would not end.
And then, at last, so long after he had
started on his journey that he no longer knew how long he had been climbing, he
came to the top of the mountain, and there was a deep tunnel at the peak that
led down towards the bowels of the earth. Though it was late evening and he had
been climbing all the long weary day, without a moment’s pause to rest he
started down it into the darkness.
There were steps cut into the rock, so old
that time had worn them smooth as glass to his feet, and the darkness was so
complete that he could not see so much as his hand before his face. And as he
went he heard a voice, hard as the stone of the mountain itself.
“What do you want here?” the voice asked. “For
this way is not for such as you, and nobody has come this way since the world
began.”
“I seek the secret to evading death,” the
man said.
“You should not seek that secret,” the
mountain said. “For death comes to all, eventually, and even the world will one
day die.”
“I still am determined to evade death,” he
replied, as he walked down through the dark. “I have come too far to even think
of turning back now.”
“And after the world dies,” the mountain went
on, as though he had not spoken, “even the stars will die one by one, and the
universe fall dark and silent forevermore.”
The young man said nothing. He just walked
down through the tunnel.
“If you are truly certain of what you want,
then,” the mountain said, “keep on to the end of this passage, and you will
come to a basin lit by a single candle, which has been burning since the start
of time. The basin has a drop of water at the very bottom. Take up the drop on
your finger, and put it on your tongue. Then blow out the candle, for it will
have served its purpose.”
And so the man walked on down the stairs
until he saw a glimmer of light in the distance, and then as he got closer he
saw that it was the candle, standing on the rim of the stone basin. And at the
very bottom of the basin was a single drop of water. Taking up the drop on his
finger, he touched it to his tongue, and began back up the steps. But before
leaving, he remembered the words of the mountain and blew the candle out.
All the way back up the passage the
mountain did not speak to him, and later, as he climbed down the slope, the
birds with iron beaks and the serpents with dripping fangs kept away. And when
he finally reached the desert, he went to the dried up oasis, but the withered
thing was no longer there, and the hut like the shell of a dead tortoise lay
silent and abandoned.
And so he walked back across the desert,
which no longer told him tales; and he came at last to the city which he had
left. But the great old gates sagged from their supports, and the wide avenues
were filled with drifting sand; and he knew that more time had passed in his
travels than he could have imagined.
And so he walked through the world, to lands
beyond the deserts, and he saw cities great and small. He went among kings and
barbarian tribes, and feared neither the royal executioner nor the caprices of
the warrior chief. He sailed seas without fear of drowning in shipwreck and fought
in wars without the terror of death, so that he grew famed as a soldier and
mariner. And once in a while he would stay in a city or a village, or an island
in the stream, and stay there for some years or decades, but ultimately it
would all crumble to dust, and he would move on.
Once in a while he would meet a woman he
liked, and for a brief moment he would seek pleasure in her arms and giver her
pleasure in turn. But after a while she would grow old, and their children too,
while he aged not – and then, inevitably, while they still lived, he would
leave them like a shadow in the night and move on.
Sometimes he would hear fables and tales of
a man who, in his youth, had decided not to die, and had drunk of a basin in
the heart of a mountain, and still walked the world among men. And people would
laugh at the fable, or sigh enviously. He would never say anything, and
sometimes he would smile.
The very languages he had grown up knowing
fell away into disuse and were heard no more; new speech, strange and uncouth, was
on his lips, and he scarcely could learn it well enough to make it his own
before it, too, had to be left behind as he went on his way. And so the wheel
of the years ground on.
One day, many thousands of years after he
had touched a drop of water in a basin to his tongue, he happened to pass where
a mountain had once stood, and where there was now only an eroded hill. And
looking on it, he seemed to hear a voice, as of ancient stone.
“O man,” this voice asked, “was it worth
it, this immortality that you have found?”
And the man smiled. “It has been hard, but
worth it,” he said. “I have seen things that I never thought I would see, know
things I never could have otherwise known, and in leaving behind death I have
wed myself to the Now and the Future.”
“And what of the past?” the stone voice
murmured. “Does not the Now forget the past, and do not the scholars lie about
things which they know nothing of, but you have seen?”
“What of that?” the man shrugged. “The Past
is dead. I have nothing to do with death.”
And the stone voice fell silent, and the
man moved on.
And time passed even so great that his body
could not bear the wearing away from the grinding of the years, and his flesh
dried on his bones, and at last he could hardly move any more. Then he found a
home in a dead city of yellow stone high on a mountain plateau, a city already
so old that its makers had been forgotten by the world, but a city which had
not even been dreamed of when his travels had already been more than half ended.
There, in that city, he sat at a window of nights, and watched the slow
wheeling of the stars. And the stars in the sky had changed their positions, so
that the constellations were no longer the familiar ones he had known.
Then it happened one day that the mountains
and plateau shook and rumbled, and the yellow stone came crashing down, and
crushed his body to fragments beneath tons of rock. But his body, even then,
did not die, and he lay under the immense weight of the stone, alive and
knowing.
And then one of the blocks of stone over
him whispered, in a faint echo of a voice he had heard but twice before, “O
man, now that you lie destroyed and crushed, do you now regret your choice?”
If the man could have moved he would have
shrugged, and if he had still had a voice he would have spoken. “This body is
merely a vehicle that had worn down,” he thought at the stone, and decided it
could hear him. “But I am still here.”
“Buried under a mountain of earth and rock,”
the stone said. “What good will that do you? You will lie here in agony until
your body rots and falls to dust.”
But the man did not reply, and lay under
the mountain of earth and rock, and his body rotted and fell to dust in its
turn. And the time passed.
And the time passed, and wind and water
wore the mountain away, and the dust that made up the man was again exposed to
the air, where he lay in the light of the sun. And the winds blew his dust
around, and parts of him soared into the air while others flowed down rivers to
the sea. But they were not the seas he had once sailed, for the world had
changed. And the men who walked it were not as such as he had ever known.
But time passed, and the sun grew huge and
red and hot, and the air and water were burned away by its heat, so that the
very dust which had once made up the man was blown away into the voids between
the stars. And there, in the inky black, parts of him entwined themselves in
gas clouds, and birthed stars anew. Some parts grew into worlds, where
sometimes, creatures walked and laughed and talked, and knew, and grew old and
died in their turn. But still he lived, and he watched the flood of time pass
by.
And then the time came when the stars grew
old, and began flickering out, one by one; and in all the universe there was
not the slightest dim red glow of a dying sun, and the universe itself was
dead.
And then the thing that had once been a
man, and then dust, and then stars and planets and life, and was nothing, was
the only thing still alive in all the vast, cold, dead universe. And he looked
around, and decided that this was not good.
For only in comparison to death can one
have life, and only when things are alive can they die.
And the thing looked around it, and thought
about what it could do.
And then it declared, Let
There Be Light.
And there was light –
Copyright B Purkayastha 2015
