A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)Blackwood, Algernon
Science
A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote)
Blackwood, Algernon
Magic -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
'No, they did not notice the starry, fluttering figure. It overtook
them none the less, and with a flying leap was into the Pattern of his
story--in the very centre, too!--as quickly as lightning passes
through the foliage of the tree it strikes. Only the lightning stayed.
The figure remained caught. The entire Pattern shivered to its outer
fringes, then began to glow and shine all over. As the high harmonic
crowns the end of a long cadenza on a violin, fulfilling bars of
difficult effort, this point of exquisite beauty flashed life into the
Pattern of the story, consummating the labour of construction with the
true, inevitable climax. There was something of fairy insolence, both
cheeky and delicious, in the proprietary way it chose the principal
place, yet the only place still unoccupied, and sang 'I'm here. I've
come!' It calmly fashioned itself a nest, as it were, curled up and
made itself at home. It _was_ at home. The audacity was justified. The
Pattern seemed at last complete. Beauty and Truth shone at its centre.
And the tiny voice continued singing, though no one seemed to know
exactly whence the sound proceeded:---
'While the busy Pleiades,
Sisters to the Hyades,
Seven by seven,
Across the heaven,
Light desire
With their fire,
Flung from huge Orion's hand,
Sweetly linking
All our thinking
In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland!'
No--neither Mother nor Daddy were aware of what had happened thus in
the twinkling of an eye. Certainly neither guessed that another heart,
far distant as the crow flies, had felt the stream of his vital,
creative thinking, and had thus delicately responded and sent out a
sympathetic message of belief. But neither did Adams and Leverrier,
measuring the heavens, and calculating through years of labour the
delicate interstellar forces, know that each had simultaneously caught
Neptune in their net of stars--three thousand million miles away. Had
they been 'out,' these two big, patient astronomers, they might have
realised that they really worked in concert every night. But history
does not relate that they slept well or ill; their biographies make no
mention of what their 'Underneaths' were up to while their brains lay
resting on the pillow; and private confession, if such exists, has
never seen the light of print as yet. In that region, however, where
Thinking runs and plays, thought dancing hand in hand with thought
that is akin to it, the fact must surely have been known and
recognised. They, too, travelled in the Starlight Express.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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