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Show Beyond the Sunset The last obituaries have all been written, now, and the last funeral orations and telegraphed tributes have been read :, and digested. But the race that Thomas Edison served will 1 remember for a long, long time for as long, perhaps, as it j remembers Edison himself that final, surprising little re-j re-j mark that came from his deathbed : "It is very beautiful i a!ver there." r r- Will there ever be a biography of the man that does not ! VJitain that quotation ? Probably not ; for it represents one r those strange hints that are tossed out to us now and I tli. n those strange hints that a dying man can, on occasion, peer through the veil, see what lies beyond, and, seeing, bs ! i dazzled by the fulfillment of a half-trusted dream. i j Now the interpretations of it, of course, will vary. There 1 will be plenty of people to assure us that the dying man was 'simply suffering from a delirium. In time, probably, some biographer will insist that the remark was never actually made. There is no surer way of arousing contradiction than to imply that visible reality is only a shadow to cloak some- i thing infinitely more profound that lies beyond it. ! But there will be others who will not look at it that way. ; The world, after all, is not so idyllic a place that mankind in general is content to see in death only the stopping of a worn-out machine. We have not yet outgrown the desire to pass beyond the sunset. Edison, at the point of death, looked into the sky and saw something beautiful ; must we assume that fever was playing tricks with his brain that brain which was never tricked before? We can take it as wo wish. Those to whom disbelief is precious will look at it in one way, and those who feel otherwise other-wise will look at it in another. Only one thing is certain. It will be remembered for centuries. For that, when you come down to it, is the way the human heart is made. It questions, doubts and rejects and then, at the last, clutches at a chance to believe. Edison, the solver of mysteries, the worker of miracles, dropped at his death a remark to focus the attention of his fellows on the greatest and oldest mystery of all. And he himself, now, has solved it. |