The Promise of Air - Algernon Blackwood

With a happy and confiding smile, the speaker then pronounced the carrying-away sentence:

'The 'eart of a bird lies in the centre of its body.'

CHAPTER XVI.

The carrying-away sentence stuck in Wimble's mind as he journeyed back to the flat on the top of a motor omnibus with Joan, for it expressed a concrete fact, a fact that he could understand. 'The heart of a bird lies in the centre of its body,' he murmured to himself happily. It gave him a secret thrill of joy and wonder. His own heart, thrust to the left though it was, felt ageless. The happy, invincible optimism of the bird was in him. To live from the centre was a neat way of expressing what he had been trying to do for so long, and he had not been far wrong in taking the life and attitude of a bird for his symbol. It meant neglecting the strained, laborious effort of the calculating mind, and leaning for help and guidance upon something bigger, deeper, less fallible than the strutting conscious self. The railway guard labelled it the subconscious, that mysterious region in which every soul is linked to every other soul, involving thus that comprehensive sympathy which is the beginning possibly of brotherhood. He phrased it wildly, but that was what he meant. The bigger self that lay like an ocean behind his separate, personal thought shared everything with every one. The joy, the wisdom of the birds! The elasticity and brilliance of the universal air! The divine carelessness that flows from living at the centre!

'Flow, fly, flow!
Wherever I am, I go;
I live in the air
Without thought or care . . . !'

'Daddy, you mustn't hum in public. It sounds so unusual, and people are staring,' Joan reminded him. 'And you'll forget your hat and leave it behind, if you don't put it on.'

He smoothed his ruffled hair and placed his black billycock upon it.

'So you've woken up at last, have you?' he replied, laughing at her. 'You slept through most of the lecture. What did you make of it,—eh?'