OBSESSIONS

My brain seems to expand and fill and grow physically light and peaceful. I begin to feel it filling quietly. And so the unconscious part now expands; and walking I notice an infinite number of things without naming them; because I am not thinking of any special thing. Now and again I feel my mind take shape, like a cloud with the sun on it, as some idea, emotion or image wells up, but they travel on, over the horizon, like clouds, and I wait peacefully for another to form, or nothing - it matters not which.

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What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

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