The Papyrus, Oct. 1908
Vol. 3 No. 4, p. 29
Imagination and Reason both agreed one day to go in search of Truth. Reason started off with a set face. Imagination smiled and sat down at the point of departure. Ages rolled away. Reason, weary, haggard, appeared in the opposite direction from which he had started, and, seeing Imagination still recumbent, approached her and said: “I see I have travelled in a circle. Where have you been and what have you seen?” “I have not moved from Here in all these ages and I have seen you spin the very circle around which you have travelled,” Imagination replied…..
Hope had peddled her last lie to the last human being. Shrivelled to mere bone, ghastly, the old She-Devil disappeared with the corpses of her countless victims into the conflagrations of worlds, and after a thousand cycles there trod upon a newer world the creature Insight, who neither hoped nor feared….
Ambition after toiling forty years sat down on a huge stone in the Road to survey the results of its labors. Twenty years later a Wise Man passed that way and saw a huge stone and some bones in the Road. “TO ACCOMPLISH WHAT WE HAVE DREAMED IS TO GRIN AT ONE’S SELF.” The Wise Man smiled, threw a few crumbs to the Vultures thereabout and passed into a tavern….
“I am Fear. It is I that urge you onward,” whispered a Shadow that leaned over the shoulder of Man. “Not so,” replied Man. “It is that Divine Shape, Hope, in front of me which lures me forward.” And Fear grinned, and the lights in his immortal eyes played long in admiration on his beautiful paramour which man called Hope….
A Shadow came to my bedside last night and looked long into my eyes. “Thou art Grief,” I said. “Yes,” said she, “I am Grief; but by some I am known as Truth, and by almost all as Pleasure Realized.”
Benjamin De Casseres.