The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)

by Philip Pullman

Lyra borrowed a pencil and a piece of paper from George and drew three columns, one headed Things to do, the next Things to find out, and the third Things to stop worrying about.

“History’s not over, you see. It’s happening all the time.

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

I wish memories went further back in our lives than they do so that I could recall all of it,

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.”

“In the flux of history, every kind of leadership emerges and then vanishes again. I wouldn’t presume to say that one was better than another. Those terms are the currency of journalism, shall we say, rather than scholarship.”

“I’m looking for her imagination.” “You think he’s got it?” “I think he stole it.” “What would he want with that?” “I don’t know. But I’ve come to ask him about it.”

How hard it was to think when half of your self was missing!

As he signed the order, Marcel Delamare thought of the sister he had admired so much. He thought of his mother too, and looked forward to seeing her again.

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.

True things are more economical than false ones: Occam’s razor; things are more likely to be simple than complicated; if there is an explanation that leaves out things like imagination and emotion, then it’s more likely to be true than one that includes them. But then she remembered what the gyptians had said: Include things, don’t leave them out. Look at things in their context. Include everything.

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….

But people were better than that, surely? Wasn’t the human race better than that?

Some girls seemed to be attracted to this boy or that, only for their dæmons to be indifferent or even hostile. Sometimes it was the other way round: the dæmons passionately attracted, their people kept apart by dislike. And the princess’s story had shown her yet another human possibility. Was it possible, though, as the old lady had said, for pretending to be in love to turn into actual love?

Gradually, as Lyra watched, she found her mood lifting. She’d hardly been aware of feeling anxious, but that was because anxiety was everywhere, built into the very molecules of the world, or so it had seemed. But now it was disappearing, like heavy gray clouds thinning and dispersing and finding their great banks of vapor drifting into wisps that wafted away into invisibility, leaving the sky clear and open. She felt her whole self, including the absent Pan, becoming light and free. Something good must have happened to him, she thought.

It brought with it a mood that she hadn’t felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and she welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.

I wasn’t a bad actress, but she was a star, and the difference is colossal, magical. Something supernatural about it. I was too shy to ask how she did it, becoming Sylvia in that way, but her dæmon had something to do with it. He said very little; he just—I don’t know—became more visible. Extraordinary.”

“Make your body heavy and slow, but don’t forget what your mind’s doing. You need to look like someone who’s suffering from a depression of the spirits, because

that makes people turn away. They don’t like looking at suffering. But it’s very easy to become depressed by mimicking it. Don’t fall into that trap. Your dæmon would tell you that, if he was here. Your body affects your mind. You need to act, not be.”

With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of limitless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, nothing more.

I can summon the uncanny whenever I want to. I have spent weeks of my life in the presence of the invisible and the uncanny. They are not strange to me.