DARKWATER
Voices from within the Veil
W.E.B. DU BOIS
AD NINAM
May 12, 1896
POSTSCRIPT
These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selvesand the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work andservice; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Deathand War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I havebeen in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from aveiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproducedthemselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls thehuman scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and evenilluminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to writeagain on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, inthe hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even ifslighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.
Between the sterner flights of logic, I have sought to set some littlealightings of what may be poetry. They are tributes to Beauty, unworthyto stand alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know notwhether I mean the Thought for the Fancy—or the Fancy for the Thought,or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong onunanswering fact. But this is alway—is it not?—the Riddle of Life.
Many of my words appear here transformed from other publications and Ithank the Atlantic, the Independent, the Crisis, and the Journalof Race Development for letting me use them again.
W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS.
New York, 1919.