The most
skeptical among us reserves a dim corner for magic, whether precognition, divination
or faith in dumb luck. Most of us keep such things under wraps, to preserve our
guise of rationality. In Return to
Yesterday (1932), Ford Madox Ford demonstrates a form of bibliomancy aimed less
at foretelling the future than reanimating the past. In a friend’s house in
Greenwich Village, he removes a “dullish-backed book” from the shelf and reads
these words, randomly chosen, at the bottom of a page:
“So you see,
darling, there is really no fear, because, as long as I know you care for me and
I care for you, nothing can touch me.”
Ford tells
us he experiences a “singular emotion.” He is again eighteen (in 1891 or 1892),
his age when he first read those words in Kipling’s story “Only a Subaltern.”
He is seated on a train entering Rye Station, smoking shag tobacco in his pipe.
He has just published the first of his more than eighty books, The Brown Owl, a fairy story. For it he
was paid ten pounds. “I was going courting,” he says, and describes the memory,
after forty years, as “my oldest literary recollection.” Ford was a fabled
fabulist but one accepts that the story is true. He adds detail to the
remembered scene: “The fascicle of Kipling stories had a blue-grey paper cover
that shewed in black a fierce, whiskered and turbaned syce [a groom who cares for horses] of the Indian Army.” Ford again
quotes a portion of Kipling’s line – “So
you see, darling, there is really no fear” – and adds:
“I suppose
they are words that we all write one day or another. Perhaps they are the best
we ever write.”
Among
readers today, Kipling, the greatest writer of short stories in the language, is
even more out of fashion than Ford. He is not a writer we would assume Ford,
the arch-Modernist, would treasure. Even if the anecdote is pure fabrication,
Ford has chosen his text carefully. It suggests the sort of men and writers he
and Kipling were. The passage closes with these words:
“You have no
idea how exciting it was in those days to be eighteen and to be meditating,
writing for the first time there is really no fear. . ..”
1 comment:
Lots of reliable studies, neurobiological and otherwise, confirm that those who hold at least a few magical beliefs--not too many, not too few--are healthier, psychologically, than those who hold none. The same is true with remembering and forgetting; it is vital for mental health to forget a lot. Minds too proximate or too remote from reality, require therapy.
is there any magical assumption more fabulist than quantum entanglement? Merlin would blush to find anyone believing that protons, light years apart, modify certain properties in response to each other. "You believe what? Why ever?"
Few passions are more destructive than fear; it is the most potent form of tyranny, as domestic abusers well know.
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