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William Blake Song of Los Plate 4, Copy E |
J B Priestley, Man & Time
"I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone,
looking down upon the myriads of birds flying in one direction; every
kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble
sight, this vast aerial river of birds.
But now, in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and the
time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break
their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings
grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and
shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the
use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings,
this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic
meaningless biological effort?
As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little
history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if
not one of them, if not one of us at all, had been born, if the struggle
ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy.
But now the gear was changed again, and time went faster still,
and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any
movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But, along
this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a
sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; as soon as I
saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very
quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of
ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because
nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of
beings.
Birds, people or creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were
of no account except so as this flame of life travelled through them. It
left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought of as tragedy
was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught
and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I
had never felt before such happiness as I knew at the end of my dream
of the tower and the birds, and I have not kept that happiness with me,
as an inner atmosphere and a sanctuary for the heart, that is because I
am a weak and foolish man who allows this mad world to come in
destroying every green shoot of wisdom. Nevertheless, I have not been
quite the same man since. A dream had come through a multitude of
business."
J.B. Priestley (Sept 1895 – Aug 1984)
