This, possibly, is an old man’s dream. Yet it helps me vaguely to
understand how, in that enchanted valley, the three of us may actually
have realised another, older point of view which amounted even to a
different type of consciousness. The slight analogy presents itself;
I venture to record it. Only on some such supposition could I, a
normal, commonplace product of the day, have consented to remain
in the valley without repugnance and distress, much less to have
participated willingly as I did in all that happened. For I was almost
whole-heartedly in and of it. My moments of criticism emerged, but
passed. I saw existence from some cosmic point of view that presented
a human life as an insignificant moment in an eternal journey that was
related both to the armies of the stars and to the blades of grass
along the small, cool rivulet. At the same time this vast perspective
lifted each tiny detail into a whole that inspired these details with
sacramental value whose meaning affected everything. To live _with_
the universe made life the performance of a majestic ceremony; to live
against it was to creep aside into a _cul de sac_. And so this small
item of balance we three, as a group, desired to restore was both an
insignificant and a mighty act of worship.
Yet, whereas to myself the happenings were so intense as to seem
terrific even, to one who had not _felt_ them--as I did--they must seem
hardly events or happenings at all. I say “felt,” because my perception
of what occurred was “feeling” more than anything else. I enjoyed this
other mode of existence known to the human spirit in an earlier day,
and brought, apparently, to earth from our experience upon another
planet.
The happenings, to me, seemed momentous--yet they consisted largely of
interior changes. They were inner facts. And such inner facts “To-day”
regards as less real than outer events, dismissing them as subjective.
The collapse of a roof is real, the perception of an eternal verity is
a mood! And if my attempt to describe halts between what is alternately
bald and overstrained, it is because modern words can only stammer in
dealing with experiences that have so entirely left the racial memory.
For myself the test of their actuality lies in the death that
resulted--an indubitable fact at any rate!--and in the birth that
followed it a little later--another unquestionable “fact.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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