Otherworld

“ One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world created within one’s fancy.
And what a world that fanciful one—how grotesque, how strange, how teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world? In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take you there ”

“ Where are now the vile and crooked rascalities of the human hive—its pride, its venom, its avarice, and its arrogance? I even lose thought of my companions. I am alone, but surrounded with beings of another world. ”

“ Do you know what it is to acknowledge no tie of blood that binds one life to another and makes for a common interest in joy or sorrow? To ask yourself: Do I belong here? To wonder, perhaps, why, in fact, you are here? To feel your isolation in a crowded thoroughfare, your remoteness in the midst of an alien family life? To feel, in truth, a stranger on this earth? ”

“ I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once—and to these I am very devoted. ”

“ Did I then see all, or might not other images in the same series emerge at some later time and the connection be lost? If I had written a tale and had imagined an inner room, an old mother, an absent son, a family trouble, might I not all the while be still adventuring in another's life? While we think we are imagining a character we may, so marvellous are the hidden ways, be really interpreting a being actually existing, brought into psychic contact with us by some affinity of sentiment or soul. ”

“ Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?" ”

“ Waking the visionary gleams
Around the colder present cast.
Two worlds there are—one, chill and stern,
Is the external world alone,
Whose lessons all mankind must learn,
Whose troubles all mankind have known. ”

“ In that period all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and become me.
Silly, isn't it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far with me through time and space, remember, please, my reader, that I have thought much on these matters that through bloody nights and sweats of dark that lasted years long I have been alone with my many selves to consult and contemplate my many selves. ”

“ In this I portrayed the complete failure that must inevitably result from man's prejudice and intellectual pride when studying the marvellous mysteries of what I would call the Further World,—that is to say, the 'Soul' of the world which is hidden deeply behind its external Appearance,—and how impossible it is and ever must be that any 'Soul' should visibly manifest itself where there is undue attachment to the body. ”

“ I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.... ”

“ Was it possible that the mere sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole tenor of my life,—a stranger of whose mind and character I knew nothing, whose very voice I had never heard? ”

“ The lives that ended in this quiet resting-place are full of deepest interest to us; they have a controlling influence upon our destiny, and yet they are very unreal to us. The figures which move by us as we try to summon up the panorama of that past are indistinct and obscure. They are shadows walking in the dusk, and we strive in vain to vest them with a semblance of the personality which once was theirs. ”

“ But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. ”

“ Now out of this inner spiritual universe—a double universe of light and darkness—this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother, it, too, is a double world of good and evil. ”

“ Do you suppose that heaven can be, opened to you, and the laws and phenomena of the other life revealed, and that you will not be startled by anything strange or new? Is it not far more rational to suppose that everything will be novel and surprising and wonderful? ”

“ These two lives are parallel streams; often they mingle their waters, and each imparts its own hue and characteristic to the other. Sometimes the outer life is the main stream; men live only in other men's thoughts and deeds—look only upon the material universe, and retire but seldom within: the inner life is but a silver thread—a little rill, scarce discoverable save by the eye of God. ”

“ I came to one place and to another and to another, each quite without men, and each casting such an increasing spell upon the mind as is cast by voices heard in the night, when one does not know whether they are of the world, or not of the world. ”

“ And certainly he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare, an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought—it was all a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human nature!"—like the tolling of a muffled bell. ”

“ When our characters take form in external Life, Thought must give us discrimination, Imagination must give us courage, and Affection must give us earnestness; then our external nature will be the transparent medium through which the internal nature will shine, with a lustre undiminished by the opacity which is sure to dim its radiance when dulness, fearfulness, or indolence inheres with the external nature; for then it forms a husk to hide, instead of a medium to display, the workings of the inner being. ”

“ And as I dressed and prepared once more to mingle with the people and the surroundings of bright reality, I made a vow never again to try and penetrate into that other world, remote, mysterious, beyond the grave! Never again to show even curiosity about the life of those spirits which inhabit that world ”

“ Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now-—the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. ”

“ The world is upside down—a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favorites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world—if this be true! ”

“ I am like a being thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-brown shade. ”

“ How dangerously close real life is, always skirting the precipice of tragedy! Plans fail, lines tangle, and lives are changed forever by events seemingly insignificant. To-morrow is always mystery. I wonder, is it not a dim consciousness of this that renders the stage so attractive to the multitude? Even its burlesques, its lurid melodramas, are never utterly beyond the possible. Everywhere are found stranger stories than any romancer can invent; and yet we sometimes term our lives commonplace. ”

“ But most important of all is it that the fellow being remain a transcendent object. Yet how, then, can there be one and the same outer world for us both? It would seem as though his outer world must exist in a different space from mine and in a different time. ”

“ Stick to the second-hand things of life and let the new ones alone. Any kind of singularity is a curse, and your life is one dreadful yawning question. You've no business to have the first dawn in your eyes and the last trump in your ears like that. The world has no need of that kind of man. What you need is another world somewhere else."
And he had marvellously contrived to find this other world, and had it all, all to himself. ”

“ Again, with many the outer life is but little; the passing scene, the din of the battle which humanity is ever waging, the one scarce is gazed upon or the other heard by those who retire much from the outward world, and live almost exclusively upon their own thoughts, and in an ideal realm of fancy, or a real one of internal conflict, which is hidden from the outer vision. ”

“ The experience of no human being can furnish a parallel: That I, beyond the rest of mankind, should be reserved for a destiny without alleviation, and without example! Listen to my narrative, and then say what it is that has made me deserve to be placed on this dreadful eminence, if, indeed, every faculty be not suspended in wonder that I am still alive, and am able to relate it. ”

“ You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, — those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely. ”

“ To a babbling wanderer sent;
Like her ordinary cry,
Like—but oh how different!
Hears not also mortal Life?
Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife,
Voices of two different Natures? ”

“ I meet a stranger, and without the slightest hint from me, he touches upon the very matter uppermost in my mind, and, in a few earnest and never-to-be-forgotten words of admonition, deters me from my scheme. ”

“ But now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless confusion. ”

“ If the outward world and the mind of man are so constructed that they fall in with, and answer to, each other,—if mere physical qualities, such as height, depth, expansion, silence, solitude, sunshine, shadow, gloom, affect the soul in certain well-known ways, awakening in us emotions of awe and wonder, of peace, gladness, sadness, and solemnity,—we naturally ask ourselves, after being thus moved, why is it we were so affected, what is it in the outward world which awakens these emotions? ”

“ It was the outside world trying to insinuate itself into her peaceful home, into her independent life: the world with its sordid calculations, its intrigues, its vanities, its stealthy encroachments upon those who seek solitude, its instinctive jealousy of those who are able to do without it. ”

“ We call the Unseen—the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays—how all matter is a mockery at the last—that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic. ”

“ Time and space do not avail, or I could tell story after story of such lives, for in the underworld they are numerous enough. Who can wonder that some of them "are made bitter by misfortune"? Who can wonder that others "are driven to wrong"? Who can be surprised that "many drift into lives of hopeless uselessness"? Surely our friend knew what she was talking about, in the underworld though she be. She sees that there are deeps below the depths, that she herself is in. ”

“ Thus it is whenever the mind begins, unconsciously, to admit the shadow of the Supernatural; the Obvious is lost to the eye that plunges its gaze into the Obscure. Almost immediately afterwards you become acquainted with a young stranger, whose traits of character interest and perplex, attract yet revolt you. All this time you are engaged in a physiological work which severely tasks the brain, and in which you examine the intricate question of soul distinct from mind. ”

“ Seen from outside, certain lives, lived in beautiful surroundings and tinged with seemly traditions, seemed to have a romantic quality, even in their sufferings and sorrows. No amount of experience, no accumulation of the certainty that life was interwoven with a sordid and dreary fibre, seemed ever to dispel this illusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from inside, they lacked. ”

“ And where then will that other world be which to many is now so dim and unreal as not to be worth thinking about? We, the same living persons, will be in it—in the midst of all its realities; and with these we shall have to do, and with these only, for ever and ever. ”

“ But how little does mere outward circumstance affect the life within,—how do we carry ourselves with us everywhere! Does not this fact of experience help us to anticipate something of future retribution? ”

“ I have already so many friends on the other side of the grave, that a large portion of my thoughts and affections are in another world, and it is only the certainty of another life, which could make the changes and insecurity of this life endurable. ”

“ Let us now consider some of the more distant worlds, and examine their claims to be regarded as possible homes for beings in any degree resembling ourselves. There are many of these worlds with regard to which we may at once decide in the negative. ”

“ To most of us, the outer world offers the highest attractions; only the few turn inwardly to the more beautiful world of mind.”
“Outward things fade—change—die; only spiritual things dwell in unfading beauty. ”

“ You've coddled the main-trunk world for so long, you've tied your limited human affections to it so tightly, that you've gotten to believing that it's the only real world, the only world that counts—that the others are merely ghosts, object lessons, hypothetics. ”