ODE TO IMMORTALITY

In one of the less pleasant caverns of Hall there is a band of the more demoniac fallen angels preparing an appropriate punishment for a group of mortal sinners. The cohorts of Satan are underlining the vacuous and unimportant passages of a public collection of fine books, and adding in the margins a gloss of irrelevant comments to each passage. The sinners will when their time comes, be required to read the books, following the thought despite the defacement. This done, each sinner will be forced to eat the books, and the lead from the pencil marks will be rendered out of them by eternal fire, such being the efficiency of the Devil, who wastes no lead.

Of course this is grossly unfair. The person who writes in a book which is common property is a philosopher. He is an egoist, who believes other that his is the only mind which can be proved to exist, and therefore that his actions can have no effect on other minds, or that his mind is universal to such a degree that all which is important to him is important to all. From such a cosmic attitude the fact that poor bookworms suffer from painter's colic is negligible. In his underlining the egoist is making a modest bid for immortality; a modest bid, for his admirers can never penetrate his anonymity. The difficulty is that in taking a philosophic attitude in dealing with common property one is more likely to prove oneself untouchable than to prove the cosmos intangible.