Experiences of the transcendental order are, perhaps, beyond the power of precise words to describe, for they are not common enough to have become incorporated into the language of a race. And words are clumsy and inadequate symbols at best. The deepest thoughts, as the deepest experiences, ever evade them. It is difficult to convey the sense of fierce reality the presence of Nixie brought to him. It flooded and covered him; spread through and over him like light; entered into his essential being to cherish and to feed, just as the body assimilates earthly nourishment. He absorbed her. She nourished while she blessed him.
She had told him the secret: to think centrally. He now began to understand how much nearer he could be to others by thinking strongly of them than by walking at their side. Physical touch is distant compared to the subtle intimacy of the desiring mind. The mystical conception of union with God came home to him as something practically possible.
Yet when he got up a few minutes later to write down the conversation as he remembered it, the mere lighting of the candle, the noise of the match, the dipping of his pen in the ink—all contrived somehow to bring him down to a lower order of things that dimmed most strangely the memory of what had just passed. Most of what he had heard escaped him. He could not frame it into words. All he could recapture is what has been here set down so briefly and baldly.
It then seemed to him—the thought laboured to and fro in his mind as he got back into bed and sleep came over him—that it was only the Higher Self in him that had been in communication with the child. The eternal part of him had talked with the eternal part of her. In the body, however, this was commonly submerged. Her presence had temporarily evoked it. It now had returned to its Throne at the core of his being.
All that he remembered of the colloquy was the little portion that, as it were, had filtered through into his normal self. The rest, the main part, however, was not lost. He had absorbed it. If he could not recall the actual words and language, he understood—it was his last thought before sleep caught him—that its results would remain for ever.
And those who have known similar experiences will understand without more words. The rest will never understand. Perhaps, after all, the best and purest form of memory is—results.
CHAPTER XXVIII
... Ne son già morto; e ben ch’ albergo cangi,
resto in te vivo, ch’ or mi vedi e piangi,
se l’ un nell’altro amante si trasforma.