Excerpted from a story by Yvor Winters:
“It was as if there were darkness evenly underlying the brightness of the air, underlying everything, as if I might slip suddenly into it at any instant, and as if I held myself where I was by an act of the will from moment to moment.”
“It was as if there were darkness evenly underlying the brightness of the air, underlying everything, as if I might slip suddenly into it at any instant, and as if I held myself where I was by an act of the will from moment to moment.”
I have been there -- in 1969 or 1970. It was as if a lens had clicked in place, or a skrim had suddenly been lifted, revealing in an eternal instant the authentic existence that underlay the world of illusion. The "real world" was seen to have possessed no more essential reality than a Disney cartoon of frolicking forest creatures. Existence was known as the ass-end of the Great Chain of Being: dead matter, imbued with that evil which is the utter absence of goodness. It was understood that once this horror had been realized there was no going back to the almost-happy dream, which was now known as a thin veneer covering an eternity of cold, dark, mineral death.
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I think that I'm back there now.
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