The Mahatma and the Hare | Page 6

at times I wear them, if only for a little while. My spirit
grows and grows. It is dragging at its strings.
What am I to look at? A small, white-haired man with a thin and rather
plaintive face in which are set two large, dark eyes that continually
seem to soften and develop. That is my picture. And what am I in the
world? I will tell you. On certain days of the week I employ myself in
editing a trade journal that has to do with haberdashery. On another day
I act as auctioneer to a firm which imports and sells cheap Italian
statuary; modern, very modern copies of the antique, florid marble

vases, and so forth. Some of you who read may have passed such marts
in different parts of the city, or even have dropped in and purchased a
bust or a tazza for a surprisingly small sum. Perhaps I knocked it down
to you, only too pleased to find a /bonâ fide/ bidder amongst my
company.
As for the rest of my time--well, I employ it in doing what good I can
among the poor and those who need comfort or who are bereaved,
especially among those who are bereaved, for to such I am sometimes
able to bring the breath of hope that blows from another shore.
Occasionally also I amuse myself in my own fashion. Thus sure
knowledge has come to me about certain epochs in the past in which I
lived in other shapes, and I study those epochs, hoping that one day I
may find time to write of them and of the parts I played in them. Some
of these parts are extremely interesting, especially as I am of course
able to contrast them with our modern modes of thought and action.
They do not all come back to me with equal clearness, the earlier lives
being, as one might expect, the more difficult to recover and the
comparatively recent ones the easiest. Also they seem to range over a
vast stretch of time, back indeed to the days of primeval, prehistoric
man. In short, I think the subconscious in some ways resembles the
conscious and natural memory; that which is very far off to it grows
dim and blurred, that which is comparatively close remains clear and
sharp, although of course this rule is not invariable. Moreover there is
foresight as well as memory. At least from time to time I seem to come
in touch with future events and states of society in which I shall have
my share.
I believe some thinkers hold a theory that such conditions as those of
past, present, and future do not in fact exist; that everything already is,
standing like a completed column between earth and heaven; that the
sum is added up, the equation worked out. At times I am tempted to
believe in the truth of this proposition. But if it be true, of course it
remains difficult to obtain a clear view of other parts of the column
than that in which we happen to find ourselves objectively conscious at
any given period, and needless to say impossible to see it from base to
capital.
However this may be, no individual entity pervades all the column.
There are great sections of it with which that entity has nothing to do,

although it always seems to appear again above. I suppose that those
sections which are empty of an individual and his atmosphere represent
the intervals between his lives which he spends in sleep, or in states of
existence with which this world is not concerned, but of such gulfs of
oblivion and states of being I know nothing.
To take a single instance of what I do know: once this spirit of mine,
that now by the workings of destiny for a little while occupies the body
of a fourth-rate auctioneer, and of the editor of a trade journal, dwelt in
that of a Pharaoh of Egypt--never mind which Pharoah. Yes, although
you may laugh and think me mad to say it, for me the legions fought
and thundered; to me the peoples bowed and the secret sanctuaries were
opened that I and I alone might commune with the gods; I who in the
flesh and after it myself was worshipped as a god.
Well, of this forgotten Royalty of whom little is known save what a few
inscriptions have to tell, there remains a portrait statue in the British
Museum. Sometimes I go to look at that statue and try to recall exactly
under what circumstances I caused it to be shaped, puzzling out the
story bit by bit.
Not long ago I stood thus absorbed and did not notice that the hour of
the closing of the great