 being born carries this punishment at times to all men; but how can
they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may befall them, having
entered open-eyed into the snare?
    One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a dream,
flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel that the
potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of
this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return; we say in such
a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp, and you watch
it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding back again into the twilight kingdom,
fly - fly - if you can remember the advice - to the haven of your present and
immediate duty, taking shelter incessantly in the work which you have in hand.
This much you may perhaps recall; and this, if you will imprint it deeply upon
your every faculty, will be most likely to bring you safely and honourably home
through the trials that are before you.«2
    This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for leaving
them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none but the unquiet and
unreasonable ever think of being born, and those who are foolish enough to think
of it are generally foolish enough to do it. Finding, therefore, that they can
do no more, the friends follow weeping to the court-house of the chief
magistrate, where the one who wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly
that he accepts the conditions attached to his decision. On this he is presented
with a potion, which immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity, and
dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited; he becomes a bare
vital principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor to be by any chemical
test appreciated. He has but one instinct, which is that he is to go to such and
such a place, where he will find two persons whom he is to importune till they
consent to undertake him; but whether he is to find these persons among the race
of Chowbok or the Erewhonians themselves is not for him to choose.
 



                                 Chapter Twenty

 

                              What They Mean by It

I have given the above mythology at some length, but it is only a small part of
what they have upon the subject. My first feeling on reading it was that any
amount of folly on the part of the unborn in coming here was justified by a
desire to escape from such intolerable prosing. The mythology
