An excerpt, the ending of an essay entitled "The Weight of the World" which will be published in a collection of essays in early 2016.

GOODBYE WORLD

John Herlihy

As a sleepy dusk climbs slowly over the horizon, a skiff slips easily away from the shore without splashing, ageless and innocent. This landless craft mounts the tide and plies the seas into a darkness that is not dark, into a universe humming with stars, toward the great Northern Lights, searching for the polar star that will lead beyond the celestial horizon into the hinterlands of Heaven. Perhaps we too, as curious pilgrims, should pull up anchor and sail into the deep blue, heading to some land far away under the escort of knowing birds, far distant from the solitary grave where the grass grows old, where the wind blows wild, where the trees have nothing more to say, where the sun burns everything dry, where the borrowed light of the moon stirs our emotions as though we have been touched by Merlin’s magic wand.

Before stepping on board and moving afloat, let us take one last look through the earth door before it closes. The light shines through the clouds in shafts down onto the lake where it is reflected as a million speckled suns. There are doves in flight, all wind and feathers. Apple trees freely shed their blossoms to the ground awaiting the birth of their fruit. Weeping willows bow in prostration to the wind. Earth is a place where rainbows are born but never die, where snow falls but never lands, where secrets are made known, where mystery shows its true face, where revelation awakens the mind and illumination breaks the heart. Then the emotions that pour forth will take their rightful place, not as a mystery of the body, but as a revelation of the soul, in search of that Higher Spirit who creates and destroys, who gives and who takes away, inside a universal realm of stars and galaxies, comets and moons, and last but not least, our lonely planet. As acolyte and journeyman to the Grand Designer of Heaven, it makes a voyage of departure and return through a universe that gives to the earth and all its inhabitants the breath of angels and the light of stars.

We stand on the shore of the last horizon on earth waiting to pass through “the unknown, remembered gate”.* My heart flies heavenward, borne on a kite, weightless and at the mercy of the wind, but I am still earthbound in the flesh. The final leave-taking has yet to arrive, but I am ready in advance for the coming journey. Along with the transcendental essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (d. 1882), I will now say good-bye to this world and be done with it. There are other worlds to conquer and other mysteries to explore that deserve my attention and praise more than this glorious, wild, wicked, cruel world.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

*T.S.Eliot,”Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets.