 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
V.
Nor did Pierre's random knowledge of the ancient fables fail
still further to elucidate the vision which so strangely had supplied
a tongue to muteness. But that elucidation was most
repulsively fateful and foreboding; possibly because Pierre did
not leap the final barrier of gloom; possibly because Pierre did
not willfully wrest some final comfort from the fable; did not
flog this stubborn rock as Moses his, and force even aridity itself
to quench his painful thirst.
Thus smitten, the Mount of Titans seems to yield this following
stream:—
Old Titan's self was the son of incestuous Cœlus and Terra,
the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married
his mother Terra, another and accumulatively incestuous match.
And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both
the son and grandson of an incest; and even thus, there had
been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness
of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but
still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again, by its
terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother, generated
there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so
that the present mood of Pierre—that reckless sky-assaulting
mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the
sky. For it is according to eternal fitness, that the precipitated
Titan should still seek to regain his paternal birthright even by
fierce escalade. Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best
proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in
the moat before that crystal fort, shows it was born within
that slime, and there forever will abide.
Recovered somewhat from the after-spell of this wild vision
folded in his trance, Pierre composed his front as best he might,
and straightway left his fatal closet. Concentrating all the remaining
stuff in him, he resolved by an entire and violent
change, and by a willful act against his own most habitual inclinations,
to wrestle with the strange malady of his eyes, this
new death-fiend of the trance, and this Inferno of his Titanic
vision.
And now, just as he crossed the threshold of the closet, he
writhingly strove to assume an expression intended to be not
uncheerful—though how indeed his countenance at all looked,
he could not tell; for dreading some insupportably dark revealments
in his glass, he had of late wholly abstained from
appealing to it—and in his mind he rapidly conned over, what
should say, when proposing to his companions the little design
he cherished.
And even so, to grim Enceladus, the world the gods had
chained for a ball to drag at his o'erfreighted feet;—even so
that globe put forth a thousand flowers, whose fragile smiles
disguised his ponderous load.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |