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How far the power of words reaches?
Edgar Allan Poe: Words create the world
Page 2
AGATHOS. Look down into the abysmal distances!- attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus- and thus- and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?- the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity?
OINOS. I clearly perceive that the infinity of matter is no dream.
This wild star- it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved- I spoke it- with a few passionate sentences- into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts. AGATHOS. There are no dreams in Aidenn- but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know, which is for ever unquenchable within it- since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self. Question me then, my Oinos, freely and without fear. Come! we will leave to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's- ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple- tinted suns.
OINOS. And now, Agathos, as we proceed, instruct me!- speak to me in the earth's familiar tones. I understand not what you hinted to me, just now, of the modes or of the method of what, during mortality, we were accustomed to call Creation. Do you mean to say that the Creator is not God?
AGATHOS. I mean to say that the Deity does not create.
OINOS. Explain.
First Page ||| Next PageCf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
