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
For Mother herself felt a little queer that day, as though something
very big and splendid lay hiding just beyond her reach. It surged up,
vanished, then surged up again, and it came closest when she was not
thinking of it. The least effort of the mind to capture it merely
plunged her into an empty gulf where she could not touch bottom. The
glorious thing ran instantly underground. She never ceased to be aware
of it, but any attempt to focus resulted in confusion. Analysis was
beyond her powers, yet the matter was very simple really, for only
when thought is blank, and when the mind has forgotten to think, can
inspiration come through into the heart. The intellect interprets
afterwards, sets in order, regulates, examines the wonder and beauty
the heart distils alchemically out of the eternal stream in which life
everywhere dips its feet. If Reason interferes too soon, or during
transmission, it only muddles and destroys. And Mother, hitherto, had
always been so proud of being practical, prosaic, reasonable. She had
deliberately suppressed the other. She could not change in a single
day just because she had been 'out' and made discoveries last night.
Oh, how simple it all was really, and yet how utterly most folk
convert the wonder of it into wumbling!
Like Jane Anne, her miniature, she felt splendid all day long, but
puzzled too. It was almost like those religious attacks she had
experienced in early youth. She had no definite creed by which she
could explain it. Though nominally Christian, like her husband, she
could not ascribe her joy to a 'Holy Spirit,' or to a 'God' working in
her. But she was reminded of her early 'religious attacks' because she
now experienced that large sensation of glorious peace and certainty
which usually accompanies the phenomenon in the heart called
'conversion.' She saw life whole. She rested upon some unfailing
central Joy. Come what might, she felt secure and 'saved.' Something
everlasting lay within call, an ever-ready help in trouble; and all
day she was vaguely conscious that her life lay hid with--with what?
She never found the word exactly, for 'Joy' was but one aspect of it.
She fell back upon the teachings of the big religions which are the
police regulations of the world. Yet all creeds shared these, and her
feeling was far deeper than mere moral teachings. And then she gave up
thinking about it. Besides, she had much knitting to do.
'It's come to stay anyhow; I feel in sympathy with everybody,' she
said, and so dismissed vain introspection, keeping the simple
happiness and peace. That was her strength, as it was also Jinny's. A
re-formation had begun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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