We don’t: we live with a familiar who is a stranger, always eating out of our hand, always defrauding us of the joys of life while denying us the reason. And we never know from day to day whether that stranger is going to murder us in cold blood, or make us become saints.
R.R. Why not both? To me they sound almost synonymous.
O.W. Robbie, you must not interrupt me, saying clever, sensible things like that: you put me out. People who want to say merely what is sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to breakfast in the morning, never after.
L.H. That was when Lewis Carroll’s “White Queen” used to practise telling herself all the things she knew to be impossible.
R.R. I always thought that meant saying her prayers.
O.W. But saying prayers, Robbie, is always possible. It is only the answer to prayer that is impossible. Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence. If we ask for our daily bread and it is given us as manna was given to the Israelites in the wilderness, it is merely an invitation to dinner reversed. How much more devotional the exercise becomes when we know that our food comes to us from quite mundane sources, irrespective of prayer.
H.D. But your prayer then becomes merely a superstition.
O.W. Not at all: a compliment—a spiritual courtesy which one may surely hope is appreciated in the proper place. I do not say it derisively. There is a proper place for the appreciation of everything. And perhaps it is only in heaven—and in hell—that art, now so generally despised, will receive the appreciation that is due to it.
H.A. In heaven, yes; but why in hell?
O.W. Why in hell? I must tell you one of my stories.