The Secret Lonely Echo

By: Llewelyn Powys

Art: Edward Moran, "Life Saving Patrol." (1925)

Our ordinary minds demand an ordinary world and feel at ease only when they have explained and taken for granted the mysteries among which we have been given so short a license to breathe. Imagine the state of wonder that would possess our spirits had we been suddenly transported to the earth from some planet undisturbed by the urge of life.

—Llewelyn Powys

I HAVE often been told by a man whose spirit I honor, that it is best to pray before dawn and after sunset.

At these tremulous hours the massive influence of the triumphant sun is held in abeyance and the awful darkness of the night is not. It was explained to me that this is a secret well known to those versed in the occult lore of human piety, a secret understood by the religious of many nations, and one by no means unrecognized by the wisdom of Rome.

It is certain that in those moods, when the clutch of unredeemed matter is less heavy upon us, and when it almost seems plausible that the mysterious atomic quiver of the objective universe may be, in actual fact, porous to impossible spiritual influences, there can suddenly descend on even the most froward head the echo of strange rumors.

This secret lonely echo of a ghostly reality behind the insistent reality that we know so well will suddenly possess us without reason. It can be provoked by the most simple sounds and sights, or even by a common earth-bound odor—the murmur of a bee in a little back garden, the gleam of a wet white pebble upon the margin of the sea, the health-giving smell of a horse’s curved neck hot in the sun.

Often it is the most inconsiderable message brought by our naughty senses that will set our psychic nerves agog in this unexplained way, agog and yearning for the mystery that lies at the core of life.

It is possible, of course, that this mood is but a deception, for no one can live for half a century without having learned to regard with suspicion those intimations that the senses are so prompt to present to the artless consciousness of our adventuring souls.

These whispers are received each year by the young and by the old. For months they are not there, and then they are suddenly and utterly present like children coming in through a garden gate with spring flowers in their hands.

It may be that they will be carried to us with the sound of the Lulworth bells, fitfully heard at Christmas time over the bare thorn hedges of the downs; or it may be when we listen to the first cock blackbird’s song rising clear from an allotment hedge, when the plot is still only “roughed up,” and the broad beans have not yet been sown.

On such occasions, for a moment instant as the leap of a spotted trout, swift as the flash of a kingfisher, we feel convinced that only an inch beyond our mortal ken a fairy kingdom does actually exist.

Many minds are naturally obstinate and disinclined to be taken in by pleasant and fanciful dreams, and I find my own to be of such a temper. Yet there are occasions when even the most grudging child of the irreligious sun cannot help pouring out admiration from his delighted soul for the mere chance of finding himself alive upon a planet as strange and unpredictable and exciting as ours.

It is at such moments of innocent transport that we should pray before sunrise and after sunset, pray prayers that have for their purpose no personal advantage, but are as native as are the vesper cries, of pairing partridges, and as full of natural gratitude as is the heart of a lover.

It is the stupidity of our minds that prevents us from seeing existence as a mystery wilder than the dream of Devil or God.

We stand before the throne of life sullen and dull. So blunt is the apprehension of most of us that we are content to spend our priceless and peculiar hours in a state of anesthesia put upon us by a fatal herd hypnotism. Oh for a conversion, for a revelation to break up forever our trivial visions!

---

You can find this passage in Llewelyn Powys's great book — Earth Memories.