But the extended Group of Twelve did begin to get a grasp on reality that afternoon and night. They learned, from sources not completely suspect, that the world is indeed built on a substratum of reality, that there is a genuine and ringing reality beneath all things, that there are favored places and circumstances where everything is endowed with detailed reality, even the interiors of atoms. They also learned that they themselves were outside of reality, that they had never

But something, almost from the beginning, has been seeping in to diminish the good-humor of the stories of our Earth. I do not know whether the tales of the friendly nine hundred and ninety-nine monstrous and alien species are subject to the same spoiling as are the tales of our own world. Everything in the world, in every world, is either good-humored or bad-humored. So all the bad-humored things were once locked up in an iron cavern and the iron doors made firm with bolts a

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.” But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpub

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. I fear we shall outstep the coming morn as much as we this night overwatch'd. — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I “ . . . the sun really is darkened and the moon really does not give its light. The time has almost all run out. The iron tongue of midnight is already swinging, and when it will clash and sound, the angular velocity of psychic accumulation is seen to

“The concept of the ‘immanent Trinity’ (alternatively called the ‘ontological Trinity’) and the ‘economic Trinity’ is the result both of the distinctions of the tradition and of the unique pressures exerted by modernity. The terms ‘immanent Trinity’ and ‘economic Trinity’ themselves are modifications of the early distinction of theology and economy, in that they refer to trinitarian persons and their relations immanently in God’s being (immanent Trinity) and these persons and

“One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.—But let us consider an analogous case. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.—But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the

On my reading, Prime in the Oceanic Novels will always be perceptually complicated, so I spent some time in the last few days thinking about how I see the deep structure and playing around with modeling it. These diagrams should speak for themselves. First, I will outline the model that I see as active in the Oceanic Novels, and then provide a worked example using Fourth Mansions.

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel

Prose fiction was a narrow thing. As a valid force it was found only in Structured Western Civilization (Europe and the Levant, and the Americas and other colonies), and for only about three hundred years, from Don Quixote in 1605 to the various ‘last novels’ of the twentieth century. The last British novel may have been Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale in 1908 or Maugham's Of Human Bondage in 1915. Both of them have strong post-fictional elements mixed in. The last Russian n

"Bubbly, mighty bubbly, Miss Aster," Dr. Izzersted said. "Do you know that some days are very good for blowing soap bubbles (I blow a lot of soap bubbles in my business), and some days are terrible for it? Yes, on a bad day you can add all the glycerin and gloop that you wish to the mixture and you will still not be able to blow decent bubbles. And some fortnights are good for flying eidolons; but most times are very poor for it. This is an excellent fortnight for flying them