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“I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon the myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, & the time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter, & die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek & then, in a flash, bled & shriveled; & death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight & surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? As I stared down, seeming to see every creature's ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us at all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again & time went faster still, & it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But, along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; & then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering & hurrying lambency of being. Birds, people, or creatures not yet shaped & coloured, all were of no account except so as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought of as tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught & purified & danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt before such happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower & the birds...”
- Label: Noble Lowndes Annuities
- Format Type: cassette