Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 151
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[Page 151]
[At the top of this and following pages of this letter is the letter M. Not transcribed.]
word has yet come naming the day of our departure hence. The Colonel may know but he does not confide in me, & it may be that he has no information. However I cannot be sure as he sometimes tells the wrong officer.
Father McAuliffe, he formerly of St. Mary's Cathedral staff told me, when partaking of afternoon tea with me, that the nuns of the Sacred Heart have a school for girls in Cairo, the Prioress of which is an Irishwoman. Must pay a visit to her some day.
In the letter to the girls goes forward an account of my ideas formed at Sakkara, the burial ground of Memphis, the chief city of the Pharoes of Old, when they ruled in such pomp and circumstance some 7, 6, 5, & 4 thousand years agone. How brief the span, of an a human life, appears, when one is in these parts? The monuments built thousands of years back were constructed by the hands of humans who, as we do, played a part upon the stage, strutting on, walking in varied fashion across, and stepping off the 'tother side, leaving not trace, having come from God alone knows where, and dissappearing into that obscurity, from whence no traveller has every returned, & where 'tis God alone also knows where. The skein and web of living, weaves into pictures, varied as are the thoughts of the spirit to whom the guiding function pertains.
The solution of the mystery of life is not yet, and to me it appears, not possible in the future for the human mind to discover it. The ego cannot solve the ego. Mind you this is no cause why efforts should not be made towards deciphering the solution, the fascination of the work is sufficient in itself to repay the labourer.
It is very little that we can ever know either of the ways of Providence, or the laws of existence. But that little is enough, and exactly enough." But thus wrote Ruskin in "The Eagle's Nest".