IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

The Great Gadfly will fly again. Thanks Robin. I did learn much from
you and I appreicate it. You are a Catskill Eagle. Higher than the
other birds, even though they sour.





But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of
sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were
open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all
this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed
but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady
binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet
gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was
the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not
so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A
stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my
hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller
was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the
matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself
about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and
the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the
vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her.
How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination
of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp- all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
in him, that mortal man cannot be true- not true, or undeveloped. With
books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine
hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath
not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges
hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would
rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,
Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free
lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;- not
that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green
damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of
understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living) "in the
congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a
Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the
blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in
the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that
gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the
mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even
though they soar.