It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has
inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars
have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked
and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange
world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame,
if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves
and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at
sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds
flew, like bats, by night.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE
There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown
from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical
phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown
in May.
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