I Strike A Light Back-Handed Blow On The Nose
Of An Obstreperous Horse, And A Bone In My Hand Is Broken.
I put my
head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned.
I fall
twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of
temperature. A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and
toes blacken and drop off. A few degrees the other way, and my skin
blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh. A few
additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go
out. A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I
cease to move - for ever I cease to move. A splinter of lead from a
rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal
blackness.
Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life - it is all I
am. About me are the great natural forces - colossal menaces, Titans
of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me
than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have
no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are
unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and
tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal
waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies,
earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts
and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing
humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death - and
these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature,
all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who
himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.
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