On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

Project Gutenberg's On Nothing & Kindred Subjects, by Hilaire Belloc
#4 in our series by Hilaire Belloc

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Title: On Nothing & Kindred Subjects

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7432]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on April 29, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON NOTHING & KINDRED SUBJECTS ***

Produced by Anne Folland, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

ON NOTHING & KINDRED SUBJECTS

_King's Land,

December the 13th, 1907

My dear Maurice,

It was in Normandy, you will remember, and in the heat of the year,
when the birds were silent in the trees and the apples nearly ripe,
with the sun above us already of a stronger kind, and a somnolence
within and without, that it was determined among us (the jolly
company!) that I should write upon Nothing, and upon all that is
cognate to Nothing, a task not yet attempted since the Beginning of
the World.

Now when the matter was begun and the subject nearly approached, I
saw more clearly that this writing upon Nothing might be very grave,
and as I looked at it in every way the difficulties of my adventure
appalled me, nor am I certain that I have overcome them all. But I
had promised you that I would proceed, and so I did, in spite of my
doubts and terrors.

For first I perceived that in writing upon this matter I was in
peril of offending the privilege of others, and of those especially
who are powerful to-day, since I would be discussing things very
dear and domestic to my fellow-men, such as The Honour of Politicians,
The Tact of Great Ladies, The Wealth of Journalists, The Enthusiasm
of Gentlemen, and the Wit of Bankers. All that is most intimate and
dearest to the men that make our time, all that they would most defend
from the vulgar gaze,—this it was proposed to make the theme of a
common book.

In spite of such natural fear and of interests so powerful to detain
me, I have completed my task, and I will confess that as it grew it
enthralled me. There is in Nothing something so majestic and so high
that it is a fascination and spell to regard it. Is it not that
which Mankind, after the great effort of life, at last attains, and
that which alone can satisfy Mankind's desire? Is it not that which
is the end of so many generations of analysis, the final word of
Philosophy, and the goal of the search for reality? Is it not the
very matter of our modern creed in which the great spirits of our
time repose, and is it not, as it were, the culmination of their
intelligence? It is indeed the sum and meaning of all around!

How well has the world perceived it and how powerfully do its
legends illustrate what Nothing is to men!

You know that once in Lombardy Alfred and Charlemagne and the Kaliph
Haroun-al-Raschid met to make trial of their swords. The sword of
Alfred was a simple sword: its name was Hewer. And the sword of
Charlemagne was a French sword, and its name was Joyeuse. But the
sword of Haroun was of the finest steel, forged in Toledo, tempered
at Cordova, blessed in Mecca, damascened (as one might imagine) in
Damascus, sharpened upon Jacob's Stone, and so wrought that when one
struck it it sounded like a bell. And as for its name, By Allah!
that was very subtle—-for it had no name at all.

Well then, upon that day in Lombardy Alfred and Charlemagne and the
Kaliph were met to take a trial of their blades. Alfred took a pig
of lead which he had brought from the Mendip Hills, and swiping the
air once or twice in the Western fashion, he cut through that lead
and girded the edge of his sword upon the rock beneath, making a
little dent.

Then Charlemagne, taking in both hands his sword Joyeuse, and aiming
at the dent, with a laugh swung down and cut the stone itself right
through, so that it fell into two pieces, one on either side, and
there they lie today near by Piacenza in a field.

Now that it had come to the Kaliph's turn, one would have said there
was nothing left for him to do, for Hewer had manfully hewn lead,
and Joyeuse had joyfully cleft stone.

But the Kaliph, with an Arabian look, picked out of his pocket a
gossamer scarf from Cashmir, so light that when it was tossed into
the air it would hardly fall to the ground, but floated downwards
slowly like a mist. This, with a light pass, he severed, and
immediately received the prize. For it was deemed more difficult by
far to divide such a veil in mid-air, than to cleave lead or even
stone.

I knew a man once, Maurice, who was at Oxford for three years, and
after that went down with no degree. At College, while his friends
were seeking for Truth in funny brown German Philosophies, Sham
Religions, stinking bottles and identical equations, he was lying on
his back in Eynsham meadows thinking of Nothing, and got the Truth
by this parallel road of his much more quickly than did they by theirs;
for the asses are still seeking, mildly disputing, and, in a cultivated
manner, following the gleam, so that they have become in their Donnish
middleage a nuisance and a pest; while he—that other—with the Truth
very fast and firm at the end of a leather thong is dragging her
sliding, whining and crouching on her four feet, dragging her reluctant
through the world, even into the broad daylight where Truth most hates
to be.

He it was who became my master in this creed. For once as we lay
under a hedge at the corner of a road near Bagley Wood we heard far
off the notes of military music and the distant marching of a
column; these notes and that tramp grew louder, till there swung
round the turning with a blaze of sound five hundred men in order.
They passed, and we were full of the scene and of the memories of
the world, when he said to me: "Do you know what is in your heart?
It is the music. And do you know the cause and Mover of that music?
It is the Nothingness inside the bugle; it is the hollow Nothingness
inside the Drum."

Then I thought of the poem where it says of the Army of the Republic:

  The thunder of the limber and the rumble of a hundred of the guns.
  And there hums as she comes the roll of her innumerable drums.

I knew him to be right.

From this first moment I determined to consider and to meditate upon
Nothing.

Many things have I discovered about Nothing, which have proved it—to
me at least—to be the warp or ground of all that is holiest. It is
of such fine gossamer that loveliness was spun, the mists under the
hills on an autumn morning are but gross reflections of it; moonshine
on lovers is earthy compared with it; song sung most charmingly and
stirring the dearest recollections is but a failure in the human
attempt to reach its embrace and be dissolved in it. It is out of
Nothing that are woven those fine poems of which we carry but vague
rhythms in the head:—and that Woman who is a shade, the_ Insaisissable,
_whom several have enshrined in melody—well, her Christian name, her
maiden name, and, as I personally believe, her married name as well,
is Nothing. I never see a gallery of pictures now but I know how the
use of empty spaces makes a scheme, nor do I ever go to a play but I
see how silence is half the merit of acting and hope some day for
absence and darkness as well upon the stage. What do you think the
fairy Melisende said to Fulk-Nerra when he had lost his soul for her
and he met her in the Marshes after twenty years? Why, Nothing—what
else could she have said? Nothing is the reward of good men who alone
can pretend to taste it in long easy sleep, it is the meditation of
the wise and the charm of happy dreamers. So excellent and final is
it that I would here and now declare to you that Nothing was the gate
of eternity, that by passing through Nothing we reached our every
object as passionate and happy beings—were it not for the Council
of Toledo that restrains my pen. Yet … indeed, indeed when I think
what an Elixir is this Nothing I am for putting up a statue nowhere,
on a pedestal that shall not exist, and for inscribing on it in
letters that shall never be written:

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. Some said of this, and some
said of that, but in the long run it was decided by the narrow
majority of eight in a full house that Nothing was the only proper
material out of which to make this World of theirs, and out of
Nothing they made it: as it says in the Ballade:

Dear, tenuous stuff, of which the world was made.

And again in the Envoi:

  Prince, draw this sovereign draught in your despair,
  That when your riot in that rest is laid,
  You shall be merged with an Essential Air:—
  Dear, tenuous stuff, of which the world was made!

Out of Nothing then did they proceed to make the world, this sweet
world, always excepting Man the Marplot. Man was made in a muddier
fashion, as you shall hear.

For when the world seemed ready finished and, as it were,
presentable for use, and was full of ducks, tigers, mastodons,
waddling hippopotamuses, lilting deer, strong-smelling herbs, angry
lions, frowsy snakes, cracked glaciers, regular waterfalls, coloured
sunsets, and the rest, it suddenly came into the head of the
youngest of these strong Makers of the World (the youngest, who had
been sat upon and snubbed all the while the thing was doing, and
hardly been allowed to look on, let alone to touch), it suddenly
came into his little head, I say, that he would make a Man.

Then the Elder Elohim said, some of them, "Oh, leave well alone!
send him to bed!" And others said sleepily (for they were tired),
"No! no! let him play his little trick and have done with it, and
then we shall have some rest." Little did they know!… And others
again, who were still broad awake, looked on with amusement and
applauded, saying: "Go on, little one! Let us see what you can do."
But when these last stooped to help the child, they found that all
the Nothing had been used up (and that is why there is none of it
about to-day). So the little fellow began to cry, but they, to
comfort him, said: "Tut, lad! tut! do not cry; do your best with
this bit of mud. It will always serve to fashion something."