APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/poe/colloquy/COLLOQUY

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                The Colloquy of Monos and Una

                         Mellonta tauta.
                                   SOPHOCLES, Antig.
              'These things are in the near future.'

UNA.  'Born again?'

MONOS.  Yes, fairest and best beloved Una, 'born again'.  These were the
words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long  pondered, rejecting the
explanation of the priesthood, until Death himself resolved for me the
secret.

UNA.  Death!

MONOS.  How strangely, sweet Una, you echo my words!  I observe, too, a
vacillation in your step--a joyous inquietude in your eyes.  You are
confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal.
Yes, it was of Death I spoke.  And here how singularly sounds that word
which of old was wont to bring terror to all hearts--throwing a mildew
upon all pleasures!

UNA.  Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts.  How often,
Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature!  How
mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss-- saying unto it 'thus
far, and no farther!'  That earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which
burned within our bosoms--how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling
happy in its first upspringing, that our happiness would strengthen with
its strength!  Alas! as it grew, so grew in our hearts the dread of that
evil hour which was hurrying to separate us for ever!  Thus, in time, it
became painful to love.  Hate would have been mercy then.

MONOS.  Speak not here of these griefs, dear Una--mine, mine for ever
now!

UNA.  But the memory of past sorrow--is it not present joy?  I have much
to say yet of the things which have been.  Above all, I burn to know the
incidents of your own passage through the dark Valley and Shadow.

MONOS.  And when did the radiant Una ask anything of her Monos in vain?
I will be minute in relating all--but at what point shall the weird
narrative begin?

UNA.  At what point?

MONOS.  You have said.

UNA.  Monos, I comprehend you.  In Death we have both learned the
propensity of man to define the indefinable.  I will not say, then,
commence with the moment of life's cessation--but commence with that
sad, sad instant when, the fever having abandoned you, you sank into a
breathless and motionless torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids
with the passionate fingers of love.

MONOS.  One word first, my Una, in regard to man's general condition at
this epoch.  You will remember that one or two of the wise among our
forefathers--wise in fact, although not in the world's esteem--had
ventured to doubt the propriety of the term 'improvement', as applied to
the progress of our civilization.  There were periods in each of the
five or six centuries immediately preceding our dissolution, when arose
some vigorous intellect, boldly contending for those principles whose
truth appears now, to our disenfranchised reason, so utterly obvious--
principles which should have taught our race to submit to the guidance
of the natural laws, rather than attempt their control.  At long
intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each advance in
practical science as a retrogradation in the true utility.  Occasionally
the poetic intellect--that intellect which we now feel to have been the
most exalted of all--since those truths to us were of the most enduring
importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in
proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no
weight-- occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther
in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the
mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden
fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not
meet for man in the infant condition of his soul.  And these men, the
poets, living and perishing amid the scorn of the 'utilitarians'--of
rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title which could have been
properly applied only to the scorned--these men, the poets, ponder
piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days when our wants were
not more simple than our enjoyments were keen--days when mirth was a
word unknown, so solemnly deep-toned was happiness--holy, august, and
blissful days, when blue rivers ran undammed, between hills unhewn, into
far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and unexplored.

Yet these noble exceptions from the general misrule served but to
strengthen it by opposition.  Alas! we had fallen upon the most evil of
all our evil days.  The great 'movement'--that was the cant term--went
on: a diseased commotion, moral and physical.  Art--the Arts--arose
supreme, and, once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had
elevated them to power.  Man, because he could not but acknowledge the
majesty of Nature, fell into child-ish exultation at his acquired and
still-increasing dominion over her elements.  Even while he stalked a
God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him.  As might
be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with
system, and with abstraction.  He enwrapped himself in generalities.
Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in
the face of analogy and of God--in despite of the loud warning voice of
the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and
Heaven--wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made.  Yet
this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil--Knowledge.  Man
could not both know and succumb.  Meantime huge smoking cities arose,
innumerable.  Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces.
The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some
loathsome disease.  And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense
of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here.  But
now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the
perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture
in the schools.  For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste
alone--that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure
intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been
disregarded--it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back
to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life.  But alas for the pure contemplative
spirit and majestic intuition of Plato!  Alas for the       which he
justly regarded as an all sufficient education for the soul!  Alas for
him and for it!--since both were most desperately needed when both were
most entirely forgotten or despised.<1


<1 'It will be hard to discover a better [method of education] than that
which the experience of so many ages has already discovered; and this
may be summed up as consisting in gymnastics for the body, and music for
the soul.' --<i Repub. lib. 2.  'For this reason is a musical education
most essential; since it causes Rhythm and Harmony to penetrate most
intimately into the soul, taking the strongest hold upon it, filling it
with beauty and making the man beautiful- minded. . . .  He will praise
and admire the beautiful: will receive it with joy into his soul, will
feed upon it, and <i assimilate his own condition with it' --Ibid. lib.
3.  Music

 had, however, among the Athenians, a far more comprehensive
signification than with us.  It included not only the harmonies of time
and of tune, but the poetic diction, sentiment and creation each in its
widest sense.  The study of music was with them in fact, the general
cultivation of the taste--of that which recognizes the beautiful--in
contra-distinction from reason, which deals only with the true.


Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly!--'que tout
notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment'; and it is not
impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it,
would have regained its old ascendancy over the harsh mathematical
reason of the schools.  But this thing was not to be.  Prematurely
induced by intemperance of knowledge, the old age of the world drew on.
This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily,
affected not to see.  But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me
to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.  I had
imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and
enduring with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with
Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts.  In
the history of these regions I met with a ray from the Future.  The
individual artificialities of the three latter were local diseases of
the Earth, and in their individual overthrows we had seen local remedies
applied; but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no
regeneration save in death.  That man, as a race, should not become
extinct, I saw that he must be 'born again'.

And now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our spirits daily,
in dreams.  Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to
come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that
purification<1 which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities,
should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the
smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-
place for man:--for man the Death-purged--for man to whose now exalted
intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more-- for the
redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the
material, man.

UNA.  Well do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the epoch
of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we believed, and as
the corruption you indicate did surely warrant us in believing.  Men
lived; and died individually.  You yourself sickened, and passed into
the grave; and thither your constant


<1 The word 'purification' seems here to be used with reference to its
root in the Greek     , fire.

Una speedily followed you.  And though the century which has since
elapsed, and whose conclusion brings us thus together once more,
tortured our slumbering senses with no impatience of duration, yet, my
Monos, it was a century still.

MONOS.  Say, rather, a point in the vague infinity.  Unquestionably it
was in the Earth's dotage that I died.  Wearied at heart with anxieties
which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to
the fierce fever.  After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy
delirium replete with ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook
for pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you--after some
days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless
torpor, and this was termed Death, by those who stood around me.

Words are vague things.  My condition did not deprive me of sentience.
It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence of
him, who, having slumbered long and profoundly, lying motionless and
fully prostrate in a midsummer noon, begins to steal slowly back into
consciousness, through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without
being awakened by external disturbances.

I breathed no longer.  The pulses were still.  The heart had ceased to
beat.  Volition had not departed, but was powerless.  The senses were
unusually active, although eccentrically so-- assuming often each
others' functions at random.  The taste and the smell were inextricably
confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.  The
rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the last,
affected me with sweet fancies of flowers--fantastic flowers, far more
lovely than any of the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here
blooming around us.  The eyelids, transparent and bloodless, offered no
complete impediment to vision.  As volition was in abeyance the balls
could not roll in their sockets--but all objects within the range of the
visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinction; the rays
which fell upon the external retina, or into the cornea of the eye,
producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or
anterior surface.  Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far
anomalous that I appreciated it only as <i sound--sound sweet or
discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or
dark in shade--curved or angular in outline.  The hearing at the same
time, although excited in degree, was not irregular in
action--estimating real sounds with an extravagance of precision, not
less than of sensibility.  Touch had undergone a modification more
peculiar.  Its impressions were tardily received, but pertinaciously
retained, and resulted always in the highest physical pleasure.  Thus
the pressure of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only
recognized through vision, at length, long after their removal, filled
my whole being with a sensual delight immeasurable.  I say with a
sensual delight.  All my perceptions were purely sensual.  The materials
furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree
wrought into shape by the deceased understanding.  Of pain there was
some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain or pleasure
none at all.  Thus your wild sobs floated into my ear with all their
mournful cadences, and were appreciated in their every variation of sad
tone; but they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to
the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth;
while the large and constant tears which fell upon my face, telling the
bystanders of a heart which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame with
ecstasy alone.  And this was in truth the Death of which these
bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers--you, sweet Una, gaspingly,
with loud cries.

They attired me for the coffin--three or four dark figures which flitted
busily to and fro.  As these crossed the direct line of my vision they
affected me as forms; but upon passing to my side their images impressed
me with the idea of shrieks, groans, and other dismal expressions of
terror, of horror, or of woe.  You alone, habited in a white robe,
passed in all directions musically about me.

The day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became possessed by a
vague uneasiness--an anxiety such as the sleeper feels when sad real
sounds fall continuously within his ear--low distant bell tones, solemn,
at long but equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams.
Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort.  It oppressed my
limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable.  There
was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf,
but more continuous, which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown
in strength with the darkness.  Suddenly lights were brought into the
room, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into frequent
unequal bursts of the same sound, but less dreary and less distinct.
The ponderous oppression was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing
from the flame of each lamp, (for there were many,) there flowed
unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone.  And when now,
dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched, you sat
gently by my side, breathing odour from your sweet lips, and pressing
them upon my brow, there arose tremulously within my bosom, and mingling
with the merely physical sensations which circumstances had called
forth, a something akin to sentiment itself--a feeling that, half
appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and sorrow; but this
feeling took no root in the pulseless heart, and seemed indeed rather a
shadow than a reality, and faded quickly away, first into extreme
quiescence, and then into a purely sensual pleasure as before.

And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there
appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect.  In its exercise
I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the
understanding in it had no part.  Motion in the animal frame had fully
ceased.  No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed.  But
there seemed to have sprung up in the brain, that of which no words
could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct
conception.  Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation.  It was the
moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time.  By the absolute
equalization of this movement--or of such as this--had the cycles of the
firmamental orbs themselves, been adjusted.  By its aid I measured the
irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and of the watches of the
attendants.  Their tickings came sonorously to my ears.  The slightest
deviation from the true proportion--and these deviations were
omni-prevalent--affected me just as violations of abstract truth are
wont, on earth, to affect the moral sense.  Although no two of the
time-pieces in the chamber struck individual seconds accurately
together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones,
and the respective momentary errors of each.  And this--this keen,
perfect, self-existing sentiment of duration--this sentiment existing
(as man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of
any succession of events--this idea--this sixth sense, upspringing from
the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the
intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.

It was midnight; and you still sat by my side.  All others had departed
from the chamber of Death.  They had deposited me in the coffin.  The
lamps burned flickeringly; for this I knew by the tremulousness of the
monotonous strains.  But, suddenly these strains diminished in
distinctness and in volume.  Finally they ceased.  The perfume in my
nostrils died away.  Forms affected my vision no longer.  The oppression
of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom.  A dull shock like that
of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by total loss of the
idea of contact.  All of what man has termed sense was merged in the
sole consciousness of entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of
duration.  The mortal body had been at length stricken with the hand of
the deadly Decay.

Yet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the
sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic
intuition.  I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the
flesh, and as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of
one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still dully felt that you sat
by my side.  So, too, when the noon of the second day came, I was not
unconscious of those movements which displaced you from my side, which
confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse,
which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped
heavily the mound upon me, and which thus left me, in blackness and
corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with the worm.

And here, in the prison-house which has few secrets to disclose, there
rolled away days and weeks and months; and the soul watched narrowly
each second as it flew, and, without effort, took record of its
flight--without effort and without object.

A year passed.  The consciousness of being had grown hourly more
indistinct, and that of mere locality had, in great measure, usurped its
position.  The idea of entity was becoming merged in that of place.  The
narrow space immediately surrounding what had been the body, was now
going to be the body itself.  At length, as often happens to the
sleepers (by sleep and its world alone is Death imaged)--at length, as
sometimes happened on Earth to the deep slumberer, when some flitting
light half startled him into awaking, yet left him half enveloped in
dreams--so to me, in the strict embrace of the <i Shadow came that light
which alone might have had power to startle--the light of enduring Love.
Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling.  They upthrew the damp
earth.  Upon my mouldering bones there descended the coffin of Una.

And now again all was void.  That nebulous light had been extinguished.
That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence.  Many lustra had
supervened.  Dust had returned to dust.  The worm had food no more.  The
sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its
stead--instead of all things--dominant and perpetual--the autocrats
Place and Time.  For that which was not--for that which had no form--for
that which had no thought--for that which had no sentience--for that
which was soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion--for all this
nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home,
and the corrosive hours, co-mates.