Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.

For each variety of humor is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world.

Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.

He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters — like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon. 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!