The Garden of Survival

by Algernon Blackwood

Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I came back hungrily to my simple starting-point—that beauty moved me. It opened my heart to one of its many aspects—truth, wisdom, joy, and love—and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!

I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my judgment: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all. Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these. The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly explanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I felt it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and to the second a tangible man or woman—and let those who have the time analyse both cravings at their leisure.

For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously, then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of the entire being into light and knowledge.

The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes unheralded—a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is not in time. It is eternity.

I suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that you do....

I remember how, many years ago—in that delightful period between boyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about the universe—we discovered this unearthly quality in three different things: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.

So, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this day one in particular of the three—a bird's song—always makes me think of God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever both surprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise—that people do not hush their talk to kneel and listen.... And of the eyes of little children—if there is any clearer revelation granted to us of what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do not know it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filled with wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless, accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird and flower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist a No.

The wildflower too: you recall once—it was above Igls when the Tyrolean snows were melting—how we found a sudden gentian on the dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the whole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distant avalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of the torrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrast the incredible stillness of the heights—then, suddenly, this star of blue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and my own—wonder, joy, as of something unearthly—that took us by surprise.

In these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; while it lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyes of the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the essential meaning of the thrill—that Heaven is here and now. The gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening—upon the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of Eternity is yours for ever—now.

I am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart, not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know now better than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein, unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, the fragrance and the birds we know together.... They tell me—even our mother says it sometimes with a sigh—that you are far away, not understanding that we have but recovered the garden of our early childhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happy gates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged inside those ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways, and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill of beauty has led me back again, and I, have found your love unchanged, unaged, still growing in the garden of our earliest memories. I did but lose my way for a time....