Picking Fir-Cones

I

Among my earliest recollections of any vividness is a voice saying “yes” across the darkness of my winter bedroom. My exact age at the time is difficult to fix, but since I have no memories of anything before I was six, it may be set, perhaps, safely at seven years old. The voice seemed outside myself; it issued apparently from the shadows as a whole, rather than from a particular corner of the fireless room. I had been lying awake, wondering “frightfully hard” about everything, why so much was forbidden, and how disappointing it was to be blocked by rules and parents and nurses, and so on, when there stole out of the hush this whispered “yes,” as if in answer to my puzzles. It gave me the feeling that life was intended to be lived. All sorts of things were going to happen at once: I would do, accept them all. An exultant happiness burst up in, me. I was alive! “I’m at it all again,” came to me. Questions as to goal or origin there were none, but the feeling of “again” was vivid. This idea of resumption was certainly present. I resumed a journey; the train had stopped, but now went on again.⁠ ⁠… It was to be a long, long business, yet stuffed with interest and excitement to which I looked forward with zest, with positive joy. I had been “at it” for ages already, the journey by no means just begun. I was hungry to live, but to live again, and this hunger was familiar to me. My questions, my wonder, seemed like efforts to remember things just out of reach, yet not impossibly, finally, out of reach. They were recoverable. Meanwhile, I wished “fearfully” to live and experience again, avoiding nothing. “Getting on,” I called it, though growth, quâ development, was certainly not present in my mind at that tender age. I woke next morning with the excitement to do things in my blood, and to do them as soon as possible. I did them. I turned on all the taps in the bathroom, tried to set fire to a hayrick to see the blaze, and let the pigs out of their pens into the stable-yard and thence into the garden. I remember lifting a broken hop-pole to hit the coachman’s daughter with. I did everything I could, taking the consequences, painful though these were, and puzzling too. For no one really explained to me, but merely said No, and then hurt me physically. It made no difference apparently. I meant to live, to miss no opportunity of doing things and enjoying the experience, pleasant or unpleasant. To avoid and shirk merely because it hurt was to lose an opportunity I was alive to know; whereas to suppress a desire, find no outlet for it, filled me with a choking violence that poisoned my whole being⁠—what my elders meant by wickedness, I suppose. Keen regret invariably followed such repression: I had missed an opportunity that might never come again. The hunger to live had been denied. To suppress without regret was a stage, of course, I reached much later; to divert this energy into other channels, transmuting it, came later still. If intensity was my native gift, at any rate, I think my energy was merely wasted rather than used for evil. This analysis, moreover, belongs to maturity, when reason loves laborious explanations; at the time I accepted and believed: I only felt and acted. Evil! It was just this word, so often on father’s lips, that, with its opposite, good, made me feel sure there was some state superior to either, and that this state I had experienced already. I had known it before, but had now forgotten. It was recoverable, however, only I must be jolly quick about recovering it, for once I was grown up it would be too late. It involved an experience of strange, enormous, universal conditions difficult to describe. I wanted to get into everything, to do everything and to do it all at once, to be everywhere and to be everywhere simultaneously. The fir-cone incident was the only practical proof I had that it was possible. It will be described presently. Here, then, was a definite, though wholly undetailed, memory. Belief, so called, played no part in my attitude towards it. I knew. I was haunted at this very early age by a dim recollection of some state superior to good and evil, and it betrayed itself, briefly, in an intense longing for things to be otherwise than they were⁠—entirely otherwise. This sounds so ordinary, it was actually so significant. No intellectually-devised Utopia was involved: an absolute change was what I so ardently desired. Hints of it came to me⁠—came back: in fairytales, in poetry, in music, yet most frequently and with a closer sense of validity, from the beauty of Nature, especially in wild and lonely places; though as I grew older I grew, it seemed at the same time, smaller, and the chances of recovery rapidly decreased.