VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 10, SECTION 1
Each Lamp Lighting the Next: the Light Loses Nothing, the World Gains a Lamp
The last chapter made plain that the book is one small oil lamp, lit from the great love, and content to be forgotten once its fire is passed on. This section lays down what that passing-on is, in the plainest image the book has. One lamp lights another. The first lamp loses not a thread of its own light. And the human world, that had one lamp of light, now has two. This is each lamp lighting the next, and it is how the great love is passed on through the human world, and never let to break.
Picture it simply. A lamp is burning. You bring an unlit lamp to its flame, and the second catches, and now two lamps burn. Look at the first. Is it any dimmer for having lit the second? Not by a thread. It burns exactly as bright as before. Nothing was taken from it. And yet the room, that had the light of one lamp, now has the light of two. Light was added to the world, and none was subtracted from the source. This is the strange and wonderful thing about a flame: it can give itself away entire and lose nothing, and every giving leaves the world brighter than before.
The great love is exactly so, and here is where it parts from every ordinary treasure. Ordinary treasures, gold, land, goods, are of the kind where your having is my not-having, your more is my less. Give a coin away and your purse is one coin lighter. Divide a field and each share is smaller. These follow the rule of this-goes-up-as-that-goes-down. The great love follows the opposite rule, the rule of the flame: the more it is given, the more there is. Give love to another and your own love is not one thread less. It is more, for in the giving it burned brighter, warmer, more alive. And the one you gave it to now has love in his heart where before there was none, and that love will light others in turn. So love, passed on, is not divided and thinned. It is multiplied and spread. One becomes two, two become four, and the more it travels the more of it there is in the world. This is the law of the great love, the law of ever-more-in-the-giving, and it is why love, alone among the things a person can hold, grows richer the more freely it is spent.
See what this means for the passing-on. Each heart the great love reaches becomes a new lamp, and a new lamp is not only a place the light rests but a new source from which the light spreads further. The love reaches a heart, warms it, wakes the five in it, and that heart, warmed and woken, reaches out to warm the next, and the next is woken and reaches to a third. One lamp lights another, and that other lights a third, and the light travels heart to heart, lamp to lamp, spreading through the human world. The love that reached you was passed to you by someone whose own lamp was lit by someone before, back and back along a line of lamps reaching into the deep past. And the love you pass on will travel forward, lamp to lamp, into a future you will never see. You stand in a long line of light, receiving from those before, passing to those after, one lamp among countless, and the light runs through you and on.
And because it is passed lamp to lamp, and each lamp lights the next, the light does not depend on any one lamp burning forever. This is the deep comfort in it. No single lamp burns without end. Every lamp, in its time, guts and goes out. If the light depended on one lamp never going out, the light would be lost the moment that lamp failed. But the light does not depend on any one lamp. It depends only on each lamp, while it burns, lighting the next. Let a thousand lamps go out, and if each, before it went, lit another, the light burns on undiminished, carried by the lamps still lit. The first lamp that ever carried this love is long since dark, and its light burns yet, in every lamp it lit, and every lamp those lit, down all the line to the lamp burning in your heart now. The light outlives every lamp, because it was never bound to one. It was passed.
So the great love remains in the human world not by being stored, not by being kept in one undying place, but by this endless passing, lamp to lamp, each lamp lighting the next before its own light fails. This is the whole mechanism of the love's remaining, and it is as sturdy as it is gentle: sturdy, because no one lamp's going out can break it, and gentle, because it asks of each lamp only the smallest thing, to light one more before it goes. The next section draws the plain conclusion for this book, and for the one who wrote it: the book is one small lamp, and no savior. The great work of carrying the light on is not the book's, and not the writer's. It is yours, the countless readers, each a lamp, each able to light the next.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.