A Voyage to Arcturus

by David Lindsay

whatever he said, his beauty was more tormenting than yours, Oceaxe,

"Is love such a manly sport, then?

"Isn't the whole world the handiwork of innumerable pairs of lovers?

"In your country I'm told there is an act of will called 'absorbing.' What is that?" She held her red, dripping hands away from her draperies, and uttered a delicious, clashing laugh. "You think I am half a man?" "Answer my question." "I'm a woman through and through, Maskull—to the marrowbone. But that's not

say I have never absorbed males." "And that means..." "New strings for my harp, Maskull. A wider range of passions, a stormier heart..." "For you, yes—But for them?..." "I don't know. The victims don't describe their experiences. Probably unhappiness of some sort—if they still know anything." "This is a fearful business!" he exclaimed, regarding her gloomily. "One would think Ifdawn a land of devils."

"Better men than you—better in every sense of the word—are walking about with foreign wills inside them. You may be as moral as you like, Maskull, but the fact remains, animals were made to be eaten, and simple natures were made to be absorbed."

the Ifdawn way

we only regard a man as human for just as long as he's able to hold his own with others."

Whether it was due to the strange quality of the food, or to his long abstention, he did not know, but the meal tasted nauseous, and even cannibalistic. He ate little, and the moment he got up he felt defiled.

"How is it where you come from?" asked Oceaxe. "Oh, mine is a decrepit world, where nature takes a hundred years to move a foot of solid land. Men and animals go about in flocks.

Originality is a lost habit."

"You think me wicked?" demanded Oceaxe steadily. "Or mad." "Then you had better leave me, Maskull—only—" "Only what?" "You wish to be consistent, don't you? Leave all other mad and wicked people as well. Then you'll find it easier to reform the rest."

Yet he experienced no aesthetic sensations—he felt nothing but an intense longing for action and possession. When he looked at anything, he immediately wanted to deal with it. The atmosphere of the land seemed not free, but sticky; attraction and repulsion were its constituents. Apart from this wish to play a personal part in what was going on around and beneath him, the scenery had no significance for him.

Grasping his throat, he pulled his little head completely

around, so that the neck was broken. Crimtyphon immediately died. The corpse lay underneath the tree with its face upturned. Maskull viewed it attentively, and as he did so an expression of awe and wonder came into his own countenance. In the moment of death Crimtyphon's face had undergone a startling and even shocking alteration. Its personal character had wholly vanished, giving place to a vulgar, grinning mask which expressed nothing. He did not have to search

his mind long, to remember where he had seen the brother of that expression. It was identical with that on the face of the apparition at th...

Life is life, all the world over, and one form is as good as another. He was only to be made a tree, like a million other trees. If they can endure the life, why can't he?"

You walking whirlpools of crime!"

What's the meaning of the expression on that corpse's face?" "Is that another crime, Maskull? All dead people look like that. Ought they not to?" "I once heard it called 'Crystalman's face.'" "Why not? We are all daughters and sons of Crystalman. It is doubtless the family resemblance." "It has also been told me that Surtur and Crystalman are one and the same." "You have wise and truthful acquaintances."

Oceaxe's voice dropped to a whisper. "You're a giant, both

in body and soul. What you want to do, you can do."

Lindsay 's gnosticism

The joy consists in this—that it is in our power to give freely what will later on be taken from us by force."

"Then your feeling is that your life is worthless,

and you make a present of it to the first...

the only thing worth living for is to be so magnanimous that fate itself will be astonished at us. Understand me. It isn't cynicism, or bitterness, or desp...

"There are many such beings, even in your world. There you call them spirits, apparitions, phantoms. They are in reality living wills, deprived of material bodies, always longing to act and enjoy, but quite unable to do so. Are you noble-minded enough to accept such a state, do you think?"

Matterplay."

yesterday."

timeliness problem

"Thoughts and words," he said, "which don't correspond with the real events of the world are considered most shameful in Matterplay."

"Feelings which flourish on illusions, and sicken and die on realities, aren't worth considering.

"You have fallen low, Maskull. But you are walking in a dream, and I can't talk to

you. As for you, woman—sin must be like a pleasant bath to you...."

"If you come to grief, your thoughts will hardly have corresponded with the real events of the world, which is what you boast

Instructed in his actions by some new and horrible instinct, he pressed the young man tightly to his body with all three arms. A feeling of wild, sweet delight immediately passed through him. Then for the first time he comprehended the triumphant joys of "absorbing." It satisfied the hunger of the will, exactly

as food satisfies the hunger of the body. Digrung proved feeble—he made little opposition. His personality passed slowly and evenly into Maskull's. The latter became strong and gorged. The victim gradually became paler and limper, until Maskull held a corpse in his arms. He dropped the body, and stood trembling. He had committed his second crime. He felt no immediate difference in his soul, but...

The expression you mean is waiting for your death."

came here to carve a strange world, and now it appears you are carved yourself. Oh, there's no doubt about it, Maskull. You needn't stand there gaping. You belong to Shaping, like the rest of us. You are not a king, or a god."

He spoke some words, but they were incomprehensible. A terrible expression came over the newcomer's face, and he grasped his neck with a pair of hairy hands.

opening chapter from new perspective

The peculiar moral outlook that had dictated these brutal murders had departed from him during the night, and now he recognised what he had done!

high-mindedness as something inhuman

under a series of heavy enchantments. First Oceaxe had enslaved him, then Tydomin, then Spadevil, and lastly Catice. They had forced him to murder and violate; he had guessed nothing, but had imagined that he was travelling as a free and enlightened stranger.

But what gave the scene its aspect of immensity was the vast spaces separating tree from tree. It was like some gigantic, supernatural hall in a life after

death. The lowest branches were fifty yards or more from the ground.

"Surtur!" he said, under his breath. The next moment he marvelled at himself for uttering the name. That mysterious being had not been in his thoughts, nor was there any ostensible connection between him and the drumming.

The drum beats had this peculiarity—though odd and mystical, there was nothing awe-inspiring in them, but on the contrary they reminded him of some place and some life with which he was perfectly familiar. Once again they caused all his other sense impressions to appear false.

"What am I doing in Tormance, then?" he asked. "You came to steal Muspel-fire, to give a deeper life to men—never doubting if your soul could endure that burning."

"What did Dreamsinter mean by his 'Not you, but Nightspore'? Am I a secondary character—is he regarded as important; and I as unimportant? Where is Nightspore,

and what is he doing? Am I to wait for his time and pleasure—can I originate nothing?"

I have luck—and with that one can balance the universe. But what is luck—a verbal expression, or a thing?"

"Surtur brought me here, and Surtur is watching over me. That is my 'luck.'... But what is Surtur in this world?... How is he able to protect me against the blind and ungovernable forces of nature? Is he stronger than Nature?..."

This world of yours—and perhaps of mine too, for that matter—doesn't give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it's really here at this moment, and it's exactly as we're seeing it, you and I. Yet it's false. It's false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to

Lindsay 's gnosticism

the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing."

one of the main themes of VtA