The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)

by Philip Pullman

caught a glimpse of a long-lost memory, something intensely important that was buried under thousands of days of ordinary life.

an uncompromising sternness of style,

Lyra tried to recall every image from the dream, but it was vanishing by the second. All that was left was that intense, intoxicating, saturating love.

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception. What else have you been quarreling about?”

You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.

“Young people don’t believe in the secret commonwealth,” Brabandt said. “It’s all chemistry and measuring things, as far as they’re concerned. They got an explanation for everything, and they’re all wrong.”

“What’s the secret commonwealth?” “The world of the fairies, and the ghosts, and the jacky lanterns.” “Well, I’ve never seen a jacky lantern, but I’ve seen three ghosts, and I was suckled by a fairy.” “You was what?” “I was suckled by a fairy. It happened in the great flood twenty years ago.” “You en’t old enough to remember that.” “No. I don’t remember it at all. But that’s what I was told by someone who was there. She was a fairy out of the river Thames. She wanted to keep me, only they tricked her and she had to let me go.” “The river Thames, eh? What was her name, then?” Lyra tried to remember what Malcolm had told her. “Diania,” she said. “That’s right! Damn me, that’s right. That’s her name. That en’t common knowledge. You’d only know that if it was true, and it is.”

But in the realm of dreams and thoughts and memories, he was perfectly at home and perfectly certain: someone had stolen Lyra’s imagination, and he was going to find it, wherever it was, and take it home to her.

He doesn’t believe in objective reality. It’s a fashionable attitude among undergraduates with an essay to write.

“No.” “Oh. Well, we can’t be there yet. Or else I en’t told you enough stories.”

The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”

He told me there were truth tellers, and they needed to know what the truth was, so as to tell it. And there were liars, and they needed to know what the truth was, so they could change it or avoid it. And there were bullshitters, who didn’t care about the truth at all. They weren’t interested. What they spoke wasn’t the truth and it wasn’t lies; it was bullshit. All they were interested in was their own performance. I remember him telling me that, but I didn’t realize it applied to me till much later, after the world of the dead. The story I told there for the ghosts of the kids wasn’t bullshit; that was truth. That’s why the harpies listened….But with all those other stories I told, I was bullshitting. I can’t do it anymore.”

Witches are poor, but they bear theirselves like queens and great ladies. I don’t mean conceit and swagger—that’s the last thing I mean—but there’s a majesty, a kind of pride and awareness, a sense of magnificence. I’m not finding the right words. It can exist in the same place as modesty, strange as it seems. They’re modest in their clothing, and they have the bearing of panthers. You could do that. You do it already, only you don’t know it.”

But it wasn’t really Will, she knew; it was a memory. All the same, she thought, it was the best thing she had.

“You gotta think about it the same way as if you want to see it. You got to look at it sideways. Out the corner of your eye. So you gotta think about it out the corner of your mind. It’s there and it en’t, both at the same time.

The way to think about the secret commonwealth is with stories. Only stories’ll do.”

everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked. Something like the cry of an owl out on the marshes would have been blazing with significance.

“Revealing the truth in the way I’ve described it would not work. There are too many habits, ways of thought, institutions, that are committed to the way things are and always have been. The truth would be swept away at once. Instead, we should delicately and subtly undermine the idea that truth and facts are possible in the first place. Once the people have become doubtful about the truth of anything, all kinds of things will be open to us.”

“Practice,” she said. “But I haven’t had to do anything like that for a long time. I’m glad it still works.”

“It’s a gripping story that encourages people not to feel bad about being selfish. Plenty of customers for that point of view.”

The hidden world exists, with its own passions and preoccupations, and from time to time its affairs leak through into the visible world.

“Do people still believe in alchemy?” “No. Educated people do not. So they think alchemists are fools for pursuing a goal that does not exist, and they take no notice of them, and fail to see what they are really doing.”

Reason had brought her to this state. She had exalted reason over every other faculty. The result had been—was now—the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt.

But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything. She felt a little spring of hope when she remembered that. She thought on: When I believed in the jacky lanterns, I saw more of them. Was that delusional? Was I making them up or seeing them? Was it rational to lift the little red fruit to Will’s lips, in that little sunlit wood, and relive the act they’d heard Mary Malone describe, the one that had made her fall in love? Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure….

“You’ll have to go on doing all that witch stuff about being invisible,” Anita reminded her. “That won’t change. Dowdy. You need to be dowdy. Dull. Low-powered. You need dull clothes, not bright colors. And I’ll tell you something else,” she added, brushing Lyra’s new hair, “you’ll have to hold yourself differently. You’ve naturally got a springy, active way of moving. Think yourself heavy. Slow.”

Maybe you were somewhere else. But in my lifetime it used to be that you had to have cause to arrest someone, and—what did you call it?—truculent hostility wasn’t cause enough.”

It might be worth losing her job to feel like that for a minute or two.

“There are philosophers who say that the failure would be to believe, not to disbelieve.”

Ahead of her the dead bones of the town lay almost white in the moonlight. Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained.

Katharine Briggs, Folk Tales of Britain,