Fantasy literature; Short stories; Supernatural -- Fiction
Such things, you may say, read incredibly, but, _mutatis mutandis_, I
believe them to be common, though unrecorded, experience. I deprecate
in advance questions designed to test the accuracy of my eyesight or
the ingenuous habit of my pen. I have already declared that the
windows of my first-floor lodger are of such properties that they
show you, in Xenophon's phrase, τὰ ὄντα τε ὡϛ ὄντα, και τὰ μὴ ὄντα ὡϛ
οὐκ ὄνγα. Now consider it from his side. If I were to tell the owner
of those windows that I saw the policeman at the corner, a helmeted,
blue-tunicked, chin-scratching, ponderous man, some six foot in his
boots, how would he take it? Would he not mock me? What, that rat?
Ridiculous! And what on earth could I reply? I tell you, the whole
affair is one of windows, or, sometimes, of personally-conducted
travel; and who is Guide and who Guided, is one of those nice
questions in psychology which perhaps we are not yet ready to handle.
Of the many speculations as to the nature of the subliminal Self I
have never found one to be that he may be a fairy prisoner,
occasionally on parole. But I think that not at all unlikely. May not
metempsychosis be a scourge of two worlds? If the soul of my grandam
might fitly inhabit a bird, might not a Fairy ruefully inhabit the
person of my grandam? If Fairy Godmothers, perchance, were Fairy
Grandmothers! I have some evidence to place before the reader which
may induce him to consider this hypothesis. Who can doubt, at least,
that Shelley's was not a case where the not-human was a prisoner in
the human? Who can doubt that of Blake's? And what was the result,
forensically? Shelley was treated as a scoundrel and Blake as a
madman. Shelley, it was said, broke the moral law, and Blake
transcended common sense; but the first, I reply, was in the guidance
of a being to whom the laws of this world and the accidents of it
meant nothing at all; and to the second a wisdom stood revealed which
to human eyes was foolishness. Windows! In either case there was a
martyrdom, and human exasperation appeased by much broken glass. Let
us not, however, condemn the wreckers of windows. Who is to judge even
them? Who is to say even of their harsh and cruel reprisals that they
were not excusable? May not they too have been ridden by some wild
spirit within them, which goaded them to their beastly work? But if
the acceptance of the doctrine of multiple personality is going to
involve me in the reconsideration of criminal jurisprudence, I must
close this essay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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