City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the
blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment
for a wizard: to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and
to look within them, as within a pool--a pool free of its basin and
enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When
will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who
know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis
for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and
mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think
that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful
thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an
elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words
have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down.
Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this
part anyway. So I merely mention that _she_ mentioned the coming alive
of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her
will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to
think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but
there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable
line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells....
By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's
head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.
"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once,
"an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."
So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I
even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it--the one
without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain
windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the
living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose
that sometime Diana--well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no
moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through
even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so
and went downstairs again--which is the earthly and rational of floating
out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.
Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as
I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have
done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go
out _upon_ the night is the essential experience. For, like a June day,
a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some
other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find
the way--I wonder if we are missed?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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