Algernon Blackwood

“ The memory, as I have said, was undetailed, but two conditions stood out in the recovery so ardently desired: I wanted goodness to be more good, wickedness more wicked. People of both types were so tame, insipid, colourless, so oppressively alike. The good were only just good by the skin of their teeth, as it were, their goodness managed by an effort that left no energy over; they laboured for goodness, and for happiness, at some future time. ”

“ I was too young, of course, in those days to have realised death, yet I saw clearly as in brilliant sunshine that death, where love is, meant only the transition into this other “state” where separation was not even a possibility. It was, I suppose, my first experience of a spiritual value. The meaning of Now was shown to me.
But another thing was also clear: Val had looked on death, or on what he thought was death. For him the only reality was picking fir-cones, and the Val that picked them was the only Val he knew. He had “forgotten” everything. ”

“ I went out gliding, as in those flying-dreams so many know, and the slight effort was due to the fact that I had forgotten how to exercise the power properly. As in the flying-dream, I now recovered this half-forgotten power. “I can do this again when I wake,” thinks the dreamer. ”

“ I cannot say that you joined in my actual physical motion, that you definitely came with me on my gliding, sliding change. It was rather that when I arrived I found you already there; and “there” was a state we had both left temporarily, come down from, as it were, in order to pick fir-cones and do other little necessary things⁠—little things, trivial and unimportant in themselves, yet the doing of which increased our value, our reality. Everybody in the world had similarly “come down,” but the majority became so absorbed in the “little, trivial things” that they forgot. ”

“ Besides”⁠—and you laughed happily, as though you referred to a brief, almost an instantaneous interlude⁠—“we want to finish, don’t we? Let’s get it done. Then we can be together⁠ ⁠...”
There was more I cannot remember; but what I do remember with vividness is the feeling of deep, lasting joy that accompanied your phrase, “then we can be together.” For it involved everything that those who love, yet fear separation, most ardently desire⁠—complete and permanent union. ”

“ I meant to live, to miss no opportunity of doing things and enjoying the experience, pleasant or unpleasant. To avoid and shirk merely because it hurt was to lose an opportunity I was alive to know; whereas to suppress a desire, find no outlet for it, filled me with a choking violence that poisoned my whole being⁠—what my elders meant by wickedness, I suppose. ”

“ II On the back lawn you and Val and I (Val just back from his first term at Charterhouse) were picking fir-cones that crackled sharply to the touch and had earwigs crawling between the dark little gaping crevices. A penny a hundred was the rate of payment father made, half in play and half in sermon-earnest, and the cones were burned eventually in the drawing-room fire, with the remark (if we happened to be present) : “See how useful your labour was, my boys! No work is lost, nothing in life is wasted!” ”

“ The important thing was to continue picking fir-cones as long as possible and as many as possible. Whatever enfeebled or endangered the picking faculties must be prevented. Picking to fill one’s basket, and to fill it first before anybody else, was the sole criterion of reality and a useful life. Church and the Treasury were both, to father, a form of picking fir-cones, and any suggestion that reality lay in a bigger state was merely stupid-silly. ”

“ With an effort I had come back, I was shut in again, enclosed, confined in something that had the pain of limitation, yet of limitation that was somewhere valuable. The truth was I had forgotten again, or was beginning to forget, and hence the half-sensations.⁠ ⁠... They explained presently that I had fainted in the sun; “a touch of sun,” they called it; and when I laughed at this the cold sponge descended on my neck and forehead and the whispers multiplied.
“Lie quite still, my darling, quite, quite still. Do not excite yourself. You’re safe at home, and Mummie’s looking after you!” ”

“ No intellectually-devised Utopia was involved: an absolute change was what I so ardently desired. Hints of it came to me⁠—came back: in fairytales, in poetry, in music, yet most frequently and with a closer sense of validity, from the beauty of Nature, especially in wild and lonely places; though as I grew older I grew, it seemed at the same time, smaller, and the chances of recovery rapidly decreased. ”

“ The rattle of the cones, as you tossed them in, came to me already from a distance.
“Yes, yes,” I exclaimed excitedly, for I had the horror that you were missing an amazing opportunity, “but why stick in one place like this? It’s awful. We can be anywhere⁠—everywhere at once⁠—doing everything!” ”