Chapter VII

But the true romance of the firefly is to be found neither in the strange fields of Japanese folk-lore nor in the quaint gardens of Japanese poetry, but in the vast profound of science. About science I know little or nothing. And that is why I am not afraid to rush in where angels fear to tread. If I knew what Professor Watasé knows about fireflies, I should feel myself less free to cross the boundaries of relative experience. As it is, I can venture theories.

*

The tremendous hypotheses of physical and psychical evolution no longer seem to me hypotheses: I should never dream of doubting them. I have ceased to wonder at the growth of Life out of that which has been called not-living,--the development of organic out of inorganic existence. The one amazing fact of organic evolution, to which my imagination cannot become accustomed, is the fact that the substance of life should possess the latent capacity or tendency to build itself into complexities incomprehensible of _systematic_ structure. The power of that substance to evolve radiance or electricity is not really more extraordinary than its power to evolve colour; and that a noctiluca, or a luminous centipede, or a firefly, should produce light, ought not to seem more wonderful than that a plant should produce blue or purple flowers. But the biological interpretation of the phenomenon leaves me wondering, just as much as before, at the particular miracle of the machinery by which the light is made. To find embedded in the body of the insect a microscopic working-model of everything comprised under the technical designation of an "electric plant," would not be nearly so wonderful a discovery as the discovery of what actually exists. Here is a firefly, able, with its infinitesimal dynamo, to produce a pure cold light "at one four-hundredth part of the cost of the energy expended in a candle flame"!... Now why should there have been evolved in the tail of this tiny creature a luminiferous mechanism at once so elaborate and so effective that our greatest physiologists and chemists are still unable to understand the operation of it, and our best electricians impotent to conceive the possibility of imitating it? Why should the living tissues crystallize or build themselves into structures of such stupefying intricacy and beauty as the visual organs of an ephemera, the electrical organs of a gymnotus, or the luminiferous organs of a firefly?... The very wonder of the thing forbids me to imagine gods at work: no mere god could ever contrive such a prodigy as the eye of a May-fly or the tail of a firefly.

Biology would answer thus:--"Though it is inconceivable that a structure like this should have been produced by accumulated effects of function on structure, yet it is conceivable that successive selections of favourable variations might have produced it." And no follower of Herbert Spencer is really justified in wandering further. But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, _remembers_; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes.

[Footnote 1: Professor Watasé is a graduate of Johns Hopkins. Since this essay was written, his popular Japanese lectures upon the firefly have been reissued in a single pretty volume. The coloured frontispiece,--showing fireflies at night upon a willow-branch,--is alone worth the price of the book.]

[Footnote 2: By the old calendar. According to the new calendar, the date of the Firefly Battle would be considerably later: last year (1901) it fell upon the tenth day of the sixth month.]

[Footnote 3: The term _kagar-bi_, often translated by "bonfire," here especially refers to the little wood-fires which are kindled, on certain festival occasions, in front of every threshold in the principal street of a country town, or village. During the festival of the Bon such little fires are lighted in many parts of the country to welcome the returning ghosts.]

[Footnote 4: That is to say, "Do I see only fireflies drifting with the current? or is the Night itself drifting, with its swarming of stars?"]

[Footnote 5: More literally: "The water-grasses having appeared to grow dark, the fireflies begin to fly." The phrase _kururu to miété_ reminds one of the second stanza in that most remarkable of modern fairy-ballads, Mr. Yeats' "Folk of the Air":--

"And he saw how the weeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide;
And he dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride."
]

[Footnote 6: _Oku-no-ma_ really means the back room. But the best rooms in a Japanese house are always in the rear, and so arranged as to overlook the garden. The composer of the verse is supposed to be a guest at some banquet, during which fireflies are set free in the garden that the visitors may enjoy the spectacle.]

[Footnote 7: That is to say, makes the fingers appear diaphanous, as if held before a bright candle-flame. This suggestion of rosy semi-transparency implies a female speaker.]

[Footnote 8: The word _sabishi_ usually signifies lonesome or melancholy; but the sense of it here is "weird." This verse suggests the popular fancy that the soul of a person, living or dead, may assume the form of a firefly.]

[Footnote 9: The speaker is supposed to be a woman. Somebody has been making love to her in the dark; and she half doubts the sincerity of the professed affection.]

[Footnote 10: From the _Fugetsu-Sh'u_. The speaker is a woman: by the simile of the silent-glowing firefly she suggests her own secret love.]

[Footnote 11: From the Kokon Wakashū Enkyō. The speaker is supposed to be a woman.]

[Footnote 12: Or, "he stoops low." The word _bikui_ really means low of stature.]

[Footnote 13: A kind of arrowroot.]

[Footnote 14: Not literal; and I doubt whether this poem could be satisfactorily translated into English. There is a delicate humour in the use of the word _fuzei_, used in speaking humbly of one's self, or of one's endeavours to please a superior.]

A Drop of Dew

Tsuyu no inochi.
--_Buddhist proverb._

To the bamboo lattice of my study-window a single dewdrop hangs quivering.

Its tiny sphere repeats the colours of the morning,--colours of sky and field and far-off trees. Inverted images of these can be discerned in it,--also the microscopic picture of a cottage, upside down, with children at play before the door.

Much more than the visible world is imaged by that dewdrop: the world invisible, of infinite mystery, is likewise therein repeated. And without as within the drop there is motion unceasing,--motion forever incomprehensible of atoms and forces,--faint shiverings also, making prismatic reply to touches of air and sun.

*

Buddhism finds in such a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the Soul.... What more, indeed, is man than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates,--imaging sky and land and life,--filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings,--and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?...

*

Soon that tiny globe of light, with all its fairy tints and topsy-turvy picturings, will have vanished away. Even so, within another little while, you and I must likewise dissolve and disappear.

Between the vanishing of the drop and the vanishing of the man, what difference? A difference of words.... But ask yourself what becomes of the dewdrop?

By the great sun its atoms are separated and lifted and scattered. To cloud and earth, to river and sea they go; and out of land and stream and sea again they will be updrawn, only to fall and to scatter anew. They will creep in opalescent mists;--they will whiten in frost and hail and snow;--they will reflect again the forms and the colours of the macrocosm; they will throb to the ruby pulsing of hearts that are yet unborn. For each one of them must combine again with countless kindred atoms for the making of other drops,--drops of dew and rain and sap, of blood and sweat and tears....

How many times? Billions of ages before our sun began to burn, those atoms probably moved in other drops, reflecting the sky-tints and the earth-colours of worlds in some past universe. And after this present universe shall have vanished out of Space, those very same atoms--by virtue of the forces incomprehensible that made them--will probably continue to sphere in dews that will shadow the morning beauty of planets yet to be.

*

Even so with the particles of that composite which you term your very Self. Before the hosts of heaven the atoms of you were--and thrilled,--and quickened,--and reflected appearances of things. And when all the stars of the visible Night shall have burnt themselves out, those atoms will doubtless again take part in the orbing of Mind,--will tremble again in thoughts, emotions, memories,--in all the joys and pains of lives still to be lived in worlds still to be evolved....

*

Your personality?--your peculiarity? That is to say, your ideas, sentiments, recollections?--your very particular hopes and fears and loves and hates? Why, in each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection. And in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour updrawn from the Sea of Birth and Death there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Your personality signifies, in the eternal order, just as much as the especial motion of molecules in the shivering of any single drop. Perhaps in no other drop will the thrilling and the picturing be ever exactly the same; but the dews will continue to gather and to fall, and there will always be quivering pictures ... The very delusion of delusions is the idea of death as loss.

There is no loss--because there is not any Self that can be lost. Whatsoever was, that you have been;--whatsoever is, that you are;--whatsoever will be, that you must become. Personality!--individuality!--the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it,--sun, moon, and stars,--earth, sky, and sea,--and Mind and Man, and Space and Time. All of them are shadows. The shadows come and go;--the Shadow-Maker shapes forever.

Gaki

--"Venerable Nagasena, are there such things as demons in the world?"

--"Yes, O King."

--"Do they ever leave that condition of existence?"

--"Yes, they do."

--"But, if so, why is it that the remains of those demons are never found?"...

--"Their remains are found, O King.... The remains of bad demons can be found in the form of worms and beetles and ants and snakes and scorpions and centipedes."...

--_The Questions of King Milinda._