So I began to write my book, Maurice: and as I wrote it the dignity
of what I had to do rose continually before me, as does the dignity
of a mountain range which first seemed a vague part of the sky, but
at last stands out august and fixed before the traveller; or as the
sky at night may seem to a man released from a dungeon who sees it
but gradually, first bewildered by the former constraint of his
narrow room but now gradually enlarging to drink in its immensity.
Indeed this Nothing is too great for any man who has once embraced
it to leave it alone thenceforward for ever; and finally, the
dignity of Nothing is sufficiently exalted in this: that Nothing is
the tenuous stuff from which the world was made.
For when the Elohim set out to make the world, first they debated
among themselves the Idea, and one suggested this and another
suggested that, till they had threshed out between them a very
pretty picture of it all. There were to be hills beyond hills, good
grass and trees, and the broadness of rivers, animals of all kinds,
both comic and terrible, and savours and colours, and all around the
ceaseless streaming of the sea.
Now when they had got that far, and debated the Idea in detail, and
with amendment and resolve, it very greatly concerned them of what
so admirable a compost should be mixed.
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