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“There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The Universe of Stars is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures—all—those whom you term animate, as well as those to which you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation—all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. These creatures are all, too, more or less, and more or less obviously, conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.”e

THE END

Notes

TALES

Predicaments

MS. Found in a Bottle

1 He who has only a moment to live has nothing more to hide. Philippe Quinault wrote the lyrics for Lully’s opera Atys.

2 Extreme skepticism.

3 Poe alludes here to the theory of Captain John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829), who believed that at the poles, gigantic vortices opened upon concentric spheres within the hollow, habitable center of the Earth.

4 This note appears for the first time in the Griswold edition of 1850; the actual publication date of Poe’s story is 1833.

A Descent into the Maelström

1 Al Idrisi, in Geographia Nubiensis (1619), refers to the Atlantic Ocean as the “Mare Tenebrarum,” or sea of darkness.

2 Poe’s several incorrect renderings of island names have been corrected.

The Masque of the Red Death

1 At the notorious debut of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani in 1830, supporters of Hugo proclaimed the triumph of romanticism over classicism at the Comédie Française by dressing in outlandish costumes and shouting down irate traditionalists.

The Pit and the Pendulum

1 Here the furious, insatiable mob long embraced a hatred of innocent blood. Now that the nation is saved, and the fatal cave destroyed, life and health shall be where fearful death has been.

2 Literally, “act of faith.” The term refers to the public condemnation and execution of those accused of heresy by the Spanish Inquisition.

3 General Colbert, Comte de Lasalle, entered Toledo in 1808, putting a temporary halt to the Inquisition that began in 1478. Trials resumed a few years later but came to a definitive end in 1834.

The Premature Burial

1 Among these famous disasters