The Song of Time

For all my solar heraldry and all my stellar pageantry, I am a mere nonentity, if you look hard enough at me. But from your human point of view I am the very life of you. I dwell wherever you men dwell – in city, desert, hill and dell – and in ways no one can foretell I come into your life as well. I am both pain and remedy, both ennui and great luxury. I am an all-destroying sword; I am the fountain of eternity.

The ravages of Genghis Khan, the victories of Tamerlane, are merely handfuls of dust thrown up by my powerful typhoon. The West’s disaster-spelling reign is one of my stray sparks upflown. Man and the planet he lives on are merely sketches I have drawn. The sketches have as yet to don a painting’s garb; and there has gone into them – all it foul or fair – the rich heart blood of men who dare. l am an all-consuming fire; I am the garden of immortality.

My paradox is manifest (to take it at its trickiest) eternal flux, eternal rest; unchangingness in change’s breast. Derive tomorrow’s ecstacies from my today’s wine, if you please. You will find hidden in my mind a hundred worlds still undefined, worlds of a beautifuller kind than yours. The worlds I have outlined for making are new galaxies, new suns and moons and lands and seas. I am the element that man lives in, the milieu of divinity.

Fate is my magic powers’ source. Endeavour is the source of yours. You pitch against me your will’s force, designing for yourself your course, I am the desert that you rove, seeking the Laila that you love. I am free as the soul is free from attributes of quantity – duration and extensity, succession and priority. You are thc secret inside me I am your being’s mystery. I live because you have a soul; and my abode is your soul’s privacy.

I am a traveler on the road: You are my goal and my abode. I am a field that has been sowed and you the yield it has bestowed. By yourself a grand orchestra, you fill the world with your eclat. O you, who have strayed from your way in this world made of grades of clay, try to find out what part it may be fitting for the heart to play. Contained in this cup you can see the whole of being’s boundless sea. It was your own tide riding high that made the raging storm that I am be.