I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as when
one cannot distinguish between fog and field, between cloud and
mountain-side. One fact only was plain--that I saw nothing I knew.
Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that touch would
correct sight, I stretched my arms and felt about me, walking in this
direction and that, if haply, where I could see nothing, I might yet
come in contact with something; but my search was vain. Instinctively
then, as to the only living thing near me, I turned to the raven,
which stood a little way off, regarding me with an expression at once
respectful and quizzical. Then the absurdity of seeking counsel from
such a one struck me, and I turned again, overwhelmed with bewilderment,
not unmingled with fear. Had I wandered into a region where both the
material and psychical relations of our world had ceased to hold? Might
a man at any moment step beyond the realm of order, and become the sport
of the lawless? Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, and
heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me!
“How DID I get here?” I said--apparently aloud, for the question was
immediately answered.
“You came through the door,” replied an odd, rather harsh voice.
I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape. The terror
that madness might be at hand laid hold upon me: must I henceforth place
no confidence either in my senses or my consciousness? The same instant
I knew it was the raven that had spoken, for he stood looking up at me
with an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed to
cast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself.
I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour to make myself
intelligible--if here understanding be indeed possible between us. I was
in a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, an
idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and modes of
this world--which we are apt to think the only world, that the best
choice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what
I would convey. I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an
impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech
at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down
statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer
utterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I
find myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like one
in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar
gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its
very nature is no longer recognisable.
I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have the
right of a man to a civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a greater
claim.
A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but his
voice was not disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying little
enlightenment, did not sound rude.
“I did not come through any door,” I rejoined.
“I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!” asserted
the raven, positively but not disrespectfully.
“I never saw any door!” I persisted.
“Of course not!” he returned; “all the doors you had yet seen--and you
haven’t seen many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The
strange thing to you,” he went on thoughtfully, “will be, that the more
doors you go out of, the farther you get in!”
“Oblige me by telling me where I am.”
“That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to
come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.”
“How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?”
“By doing something.”
“What?”
“Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are at
home, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get in.”
“I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I shall
not try again!”
“You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether you
have got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen.”
“Do you never go out, sir?”
“When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is such
a half-baked sort of place, it is at once so childish and so
self-satisfied--in fact, it is not sufficiently developed for an old
raven--at your service!”
“Am I wrong, then, in presuming that a man is superior to a bird?”
“That is as it may be. We do not waste our intellects in generalising,
but take man or bird as we find him.--I think it is now my turn to ask
you a question!”
“You have the best of rights,” I replied, “in the fact that you CAN do
so!”
“Well answered!” he rejoined. “Tell me, then, who you are--if you happen
to know.”
“How should I help knowing? I am myself, and must know!”
“If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else;
but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own
father?--or, excuse me, your own fool?--Who are you, pray?”
I became at once aware that I could give him no notion of who I was.
Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who! Then I
understood that I did not know myself, did not know what I was, had no
grounds on which to determine that I was one and not another. As for the
name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care to
recall it, for it meant nothing, and what it might be was plainly of
no consequence here. I had indeed almost forgotten that there it was a
custom for everybody to have a name! So I held my peace, and it was my
wisdom; for what should I say to a creature such as this raven, who saw
through accident into entity?
“Look at me,” he said, “and tell me who I am.”
As he spoke, he turned his back, and instantly I knew him. He was no
longer a raven, but a man above the middle height with a stoop, very
thin, and wearing a long black tail-coat. Again he turned, and I saw him
a raven.
“I have seen you before, sir,” I said, feeling foolish rather than
surprised.
“How can you say so from seeing me behind?” he rejoined. “Did you ever
see yourself behind? You have never seen yourself at all!--Tell me now,
then, who I am.”
“I humbly beg your pardon,” I answered: “I believe you were once the
librarian of our house, but more WHO I do not know.”
“Why do you beg my pardon?”
“Because I took you for a raven,” I said--seeing him before me as
plainly a raven as bird or man could look.
“You did me no wrong,” he returned. “Calling me a raven, or thinking me
one, you allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can
demand of his fellow-beings. Therefore, in return, I will give you a
lesson:--No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he IS,
and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is
nobody. There is more in it than you can see now, but not more than you
need to see. You have, I fear, got into this region too soon, but none
the less you must get to be at home in it; for home, as you may or
may not know, is the only place where you can go out and in. There are
places you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place,
if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.”
He turned to walk away, and again I saw the librarian. He did not appear
to have changed, only to have taken up his shadow. I know this seems
nonsense, but I cannot help it.
I gazed after him until I saw him no more; but whether distance hid him,
or he disappeared among the heather, I cannot tell.
Could it be that I was dead, I thought, and did not know it? Was I in
what we used to call the world beyond the grave? and must I wander about
seeking my place in it? How was I to find myself at home? The raven
said I must do something: what could I do here?--And would that make me
somebody? for now, alas, I was nobody!
I took the way Mr. Raven had gone, and went slowly after him. Presently
I saw a wood of tall slender pine-trees, and turned toward it. The odour
of it met me on my way, and I made haste to bury myself in it.
Plunged at length in its twilight glooms, I spied before me something
with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour,
but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a
radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten
chords of a musical instrument. What it was grew no plainer as I went
nearer, and when I came close up, I ceased to see it, only the form
and colour of the trees beyond seemed strangely uncertain. I would have
passed between the stems, but received a slight shock, stumbled,
and fell. When I rose, I saw before me the wooden wall of the garret
chamber. I turned, and there was the mirror, on whose top the black
eagle seemed but that moment to have perched.
Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret
spaces had an UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting for
something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went
through me on the winding stair: the house had grown strange to me!
something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted down the
spiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On the next
floor I lost my way, and had gone through several passages a second time
ere I found the head of the stair. At the top of the great stair I had
come to myself a little, and in a few moments I sat recovering my breath
in the library.
Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair!
The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it,
threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building,
it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any
moment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere safe! I would
let, I would sell the dreadful place, in which an aërial portal stood
ever open to creatures whose life was other than human! I would purchase
a crag in Switzerland, and thereon build a wooden nest of one story with
never a garret above it, guarded by some grand old peak that would send
down nothing worse than a few tons of whelming rock!
I knew all the time that my thinking was foolish, and was even aware of
a certain undertone of contemptuous humour in it; but suddenly it was
checked, and I seemed again to hear the croak of the raven.
“If I know nothing of my own garret,” I thought, “what is there
to secure me against my own brain? Can I tell what it is even now
generating?--what thought it may present me the next moment, the next
month, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What is behind
my THINK? Am I there at all?--Who, what am I?”
I could no more answer the question now than when the raven put it to
me in--at--“Where in?--where at?” I said, and gave myself up as knowing
anything of myself or the universe.
I started to my feet, hurried across the room to the masked door, where
the mutilated volume, sticking out from the flat of soulless, bodiless,
non-existent books, appeared to beckon me, went down on my knees, and
opened it as far as its position would permit, but could see nothing. I
got up again, lighted a taper, and peeping as into a pair of reluctant
jaws, perceived that the manuscript was verse. Further I could not carry
discovery. Beginnings of lines were visible on the left-hand page,
and ends of lines on the other; but I could not, of course, get at the
beginning and end of a single line, and was unable, in what I could
read, to make any guess at the sense. The mere words, however, woke in
me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible.
Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake
feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form--spiritual
sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved: here, some of the phrases,
some of the senseless half-lines, some even of the individual words
affected me in similar fashion--as with the aroma of an idea, rousing
in me a great longing to know what the poem or poems might, even yet in
their mutilation, hold or suggest.
I copied out a few of the larger shreds attainable, and tried hard to
complete some of the lines, but without the least success. The only
thing I gained in the effort was so much weariness that, when I went to
bed, I fell asleep at once and slept soundly.
In the morning all that horror of the empty garret spaces had left me.