The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8): Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8): Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can
remember my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of
imagination, of the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one
another by spoken words and by unspoken thought till they have become a
single intense, unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master,
I thought, but all the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a
moment what I must call a supernatural artist.
IV
Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had
got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, ‘Why,
the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
over maybe’—or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
with what had appeared to be more than the mind’s eye.
One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My
fellow-student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come
again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again
in the middle of the night and given the message. I myself had no
knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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