Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of one’s pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!

At that moment his feet were certainly on terra firma; and so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent temper of our soul that for the moment he felt that he would never feel “life-sickness” again.

From time to time, terrestrial comets — the blue flash of a kingfisher, the red whisk of a fox — would furrow and thrill the surface of the earth with beauty.

There’s no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one’s been used all one’s life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing.

But, as everybody knows, legal rights can be but weaklings — puny little child princes, cowed by their bastard uncles, Precedent and Seniority.

the real anchor is not hope but faith — even if it be only somebody else’s faith.

“And if all the gifts of Life are good, perhaps, too, are all the shapes she chooses to take, and which we cannot alter.