The Jacket (Star-Rover)

Here I close. I can only repeat myself. There is no death. Life is spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes, ever a-crawl with the chemic ferment that informs it, ever plastic, ever crystallizing, only to melt into the flux and to crystallize into fresh and diverse forms that are ephemeral and that melt back into the flux. Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through successive and endless incarnations as it works upward toward the light. What shall I be when I live again? I wonder. I wonder. . . .

live in the present. I brood neither over past nor future. I am careless, improvident, uncautious, happy out of sheer well-being and overplus of physical energy.

I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon them in the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no other torture was quite the equal of that chair torture. By my body that stout chair was battered out of any semblance of a chair. Another chair was brought, and in time that chair was demolished.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy things ere the world was prime.

We fight best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.

We trusted one another fully, and we would have died rather than betray that trust.

It is a good world,” I consoled her. “Good is the plan and wide. There is room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the heaven that is his heart’s desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the grave.

In general, any woman has fundamental charm for any man. When this charm becomes particular, then we call it love. Miriam had this particular charm for me. Verily I was co-partner in her charm. Half of it was my own man’s life in me that leapt and met her wide-armed and made in me all that she was desirable plus all my desire of her.

“Nobody will fight quicker for what is right than I will