Free The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Page A

expected? Do you imagine that there is a symbolism in all this only too easy to understand in the case of a young girl? Sort of love phantasy? Like a dream, where the wish for fulfilment is hardly even screened? It may be so. And if so, taking the way it happened, I think it was rather lovely. I shouldn’t mind its being like that, I mean. Bless you, it wouldn’t need many touches to make it a classical story! Therefore if I say that it wasn’t quite like that, believe me it is not because of any desire to suppress or otherwise act the cunning censor.
    There was no imagined Figure of Spring. Male or female. That was not it at all. It was the something in time before the Figure; in the way, say, that primitive folk first thought a mountain had a spirit. They did not in their minds give the spirit a human shape or really any other shape. I know this quite certainly. As it were, they did not dare! They might make something or accept some odd thing they found near the mountain as a sign of the spirit. But it wasn’t the spirit itself, and certainly not its shape. Any more than an old boot found lying about would be to us the shape of the person who had worn it. But we have seen persons. No-one has seen the spirit; not even as in a glass darkly, for we only fancy—or dread—we might glimpse it so. I have had one or two very interesting talks with Aunt Phemie about this. It fascinates me, and Aunt Phemie does her best because she thinks I am trying to clean up my unfortunate mind. She is right there (though I have a cunning idea about it all which I don’t tell her). In fact I know that she has been looking up Freud on Dreams. The thick volume has shifted its place in the small collection of books from her teaching days. Some years ago, when here on a leave, I had gone through a lot of it. What I really wanted to find out—I had heard so much know-all talk about it—was what certain things one dreams about really mean. As far as I could see almost every natural object in a dream is a sex symbol. I remember Julie once telling a remarkable dream she had, rather like a De Quincey marvel—and later I overheard the male comment: My God, isn’t she sex-ridden! So I satisfied myself that I should never tell my most innocent dreams to anyone. However, I had told a curious dream to Aunt Phemie.
    But I’m not going to discuss Freud now. As it happens I did not dislike the man himself as he came through his pages—though I remember being shaken when he said that a hated enemy was as indispensable to his emotional life as an intimate friend. So let it be clear that I really know little about psychology or psychoanalysis. When in uniform, I heard a few lectures, but they were puerile. I am merely trying to be honest, and perhaps if I am honest enough I may give my horrid self away to myself!
    Now for Aunt Phemie helpfully quoting Freud. She turned up the actual words in the book and read that from the analysis of dreams we are encouraged to expect a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of psychical things in him that are innate. I think that is very wonderful of Freud, and it’s his use of a word like “encouraged” that sort of makes you like him! Psychical things that are innate. So you don’t as it were have to learn them. They come to you —as spring came to me!
    Haven’t I been cunning, leading you up the garden path to that? But we’re not at the top of the garden yet. Oh dear, I’m excited. I feel utterly exhausted, but with my mind going like Aunt Phemie’s clock with the pendulum off… .
    I relaxed—but am now at it again. I seem to have bogged everything up with all these words. But what I am trying to tell you, Ranald, is very simple. It’s as simple as this: when I went out just now for a walk and looked at things about me—hedge, field of grain, trees, the light on them—a tired old skin fell softly from me