Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

Then we cease to note their idiosyncrasies, and they merge, till autumn, into one solid, unobtrusive green curtain for throwing into relief brighter and sharper things.

there is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Think of the Dapple, or the Dawl, when they roll the sunset towards the east. Think of an autumn wood, or a hawthorn in May. A hawthorn in May — there’s a miracle for you! Who would ever have dreamed that that gnarled stumpy old tree had the power to do that? Well, all these things are familiar sights, but what should we think if never having seen them we read a description of them, or saw them for the first time? A golden river! Flaming trees! Trees that suddenly break into flower! For all we know, it may be Dorimare that is Fairyland to the people across the Debatable Hills.”

The malady you suffer from should, I think, be called ‘life-sickness.’ You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick. There, beneath you, all round you, there surges and swells, and ebbs and flows, that great, ungovernable, ruthless element that we call life. And its motion gets into your blood, turns your head dizzy. Get your sea legs, Master Nathaniel! By which I do not mean you must cease feeling the motion … go on feeling it, but learn to like it; or if not to like it, at any rate to bear it with firm legs and a steady head.”

And in the distance, here and there, standing motionless and in complete silence by the flowing Dapple, were red-roofed villages — the least vain of all fair things, for they never looked at their own reflection in the water, but gazed unblinkingly at the horizon. And there were ruined castles covered with ivy — the badge of the old order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides violets. And the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of color fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green?

Dame Jessamine, placidly fanning herself to sleep, with her pink-tongued mushroom-colored pug snoring and choking in her lap.

“And if all these fat pigs of Senators,” they said, “were set running like that a little oftener, why, then, they’d make better bacon!”

using this from now on

But man can’t live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion — the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart’s content, and says, ‘If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.’ And he creates a monster to inhabit it — the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies.”

And then there is the fright you gave him with your question, ‘Do the dead bleed?’ Nothing will make me believe that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and the coffin with fairy fruit … he might think of that on second thoughts, not right away.

“But about that jerkin — you do cut an old man short, you do … it might have been green, but then again it might have been yellow. But the young gentleman what I saw was not the one as you’re after.” “How do you know?” “Why, because he was the Seneschal’s son — the one I saw,” said the old man proudly, as if the fact put him at once into a superior position to Luke. “But it’s the Seneschal’s son — Master Ranulph Chanticleer, that I’m after,

Hazel clenched her fists and set her teeth … She would assert herself!—she would!… Now, at once? Why not give them, say, till noon, to come back? Yes, she would give them till noon.

admiring her old stone friend. To her amazement, however, as soon as his eyes fell on it he clapped his hand against his thigh, and burst out laughing. “By the Sun, Moon and Stars!” he cried, “here’s the answer to Portunus’s riddle: ‘the tree yet not a tree, the man yet not a man,’” and he repeated to Hazel the one consecutive sentence that Portunus had managed to enunciate. “‘Who has no arms and yet can strike, who is dumb and yet can tell secrets,’” she repeated after him. “Can you strike and tell secrets, old friend?” she asked whimsically, stroking the grey lichened stone. And then she blushed and laughed as if to apologize for this exhibition of childishness.