“One cannot make a list of the glory of a thing,” I ventured at last.
“Well, no,” Pelleas admitted. “If only one could what a talisman it would be to take out and read, on one’s worst days.”
It would indeed. But I suppose that one’s list of Spring birds would help one on such a day if one would, so to speak, read deep down into the page.
“We might make a ‘Bird List: Part Two,’” Pelleas suggested, “for that kind of thing.”
“But how could one?” I objected; “for example: ‘April 29th—Rose-breasted grosbeak day. A momentary knowledge that there is more about a bird and about what he is and about what we are than one commonly supposes.’ You see, Pelleas, how absurd that would be.”
“Ah, well,” he protested stoutly, “one needn’t try to write it out in words. One could merely indicate it. Just that would help one to keep alive the thrill of a thing. Such a device would be very dear to every one.”
That is true. To keep alive the thrill of a thing, of revelation, of prophecy, of belief—we all go asking how to do that.
“I dare say though,” Pelleas said, “that one could keep it alive by merely passing it on. The point is to keep such moments alive. Not necessarily to keep them for one’s own.”
To keep alive the thrill of that moment when we had seen the grosbeaks, the high moment of a Spring morning; not to know these little ecstasies briefly, but to abide in their essential peace; is this not as if one were arbiter of certain modes of immortality?
“Surely that would make one a ‘restorer of paths to dwell in,’” he added.