"Inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn,
Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,
Rend thou the veil and pass alone within,
Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn.
Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born?
Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in?
Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin.
With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.
The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal;
The endless goal is one with the endless way;
From every gulf the tides of Being roll,
From every zenith burns the indwelling day,
And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul;
And these are God and thou thyself art they."
--F.W.H. MYERS. From "A Cosmic Outlook"
The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a
Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that
does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment
all alone.
If O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks,
left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought
this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught
small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence
conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered
sequence could possibly have done.
Climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed
round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as
I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and
space, and I caught myself dreaming too. "A thousand years in His
sight"--I understood the old words as refreshingly new--might be a day.
Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed
while he listened to the singing of a little bird.
My practical questions--it was only at the beginning that I was dull
enough to ask them--he did not satisfy, because he could not. There
was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention.
"You really felt the Earth about and in you," I had asked, "much as
one feels the presence of a friend and living person?"
"Drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one
awfully loved." His voice a little trembled as he said it.
"So speech unnecessary?"
"Impossible--fatal," was the laconic, comprehensive reply, "limiting:
destructive even."
That, at least, I grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by
which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared
for, gathered all wonderfully in.
"And your Russian friend--your leader?" I ventured, haltingly.