Whether you (by you I mean any other agglomeration of souls) really wish for immortality as an agglomeration, I cannot tell. But I confess that ”my mind to me a kingdom is” —not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable. I have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in water (sea-water, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on mountain tops. I have souls longing for the tumult of great cities, and souls longing to dwell in tropical solitude; souls, also, in various stages of naked savagery; souls demanding nomad freedom without tribute ; souls conservative, delicate, loyal to empire and to feudal tradition, and souls that are Nihilists, deserving Siberia; sleepless souls, hating inaction, and hermit souls, dwelling in such meditative isolation that only at intervals of years can I feel them moving about; souls that have faith in fetishes; polytheistic souls souls proclaiming Islam; and souls medieval, loving cloister shadow and incense and glimmer of tapers and the awful altitude of Gothic glooms. Cooperation among all these is not to be thought of: always there is trouble, — revolt, confusion, civil war. The majority detest this state of things; multitudes would gladly emigrate. And the wiser minority feel that they need never hope for better conditions until after the total demolition of the existing social structure.
I an individual,—an individual soul! Nay, I am a population,—a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I am, eons of eons! Countless times the concourse now making me has been scattered, and mixed with other scattering. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration? Perhaps, after trillions of ages of burning in different dynasties of suns, the very best of me may come together again.
