Free The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Page B

and I was fresh and new. You know how after a sea bathe in summer your skin does actually feel new? Only, this is your mind itself, the psychical thing; this is suddenly you yourself; and it is delightful and infinitely natural. You walk along and all the horrid things have sloughed from you. You smile at the chaffinch as he skips upon the air. Everyone at some time in his life has experienced this. You know that. You know it’s true. You know it’s innate. And you know that we have conspired to murder it.
    I am not being excessive. I am only aware all in a dreadful moment that I have failed to tell you. I suddenly feel desolated about that, and if I went out now, the earth and the growing things would not know me as I should not know them.
    It’s not easy to know them in this way; it’s only as simple as daylight. It needs a lot of re-learning. You have got to get back, to get back into your own mind; though at once I see that that is what it is only when you think about it. Actually what happens is that you step forward into it. It’s as if what is far back in your mind, like a memory, is actually forward in the happening, and you step into it now. That must sound terribly confused. Yet suddenly there is a glimmer, and I see Hamish’s face, and I hear his sudden laughter. Nae bother! I wonder—I wonder—if it’s something like this he means by time! Oh, if so, then it’s revelation. Past, future, and present in the one step. In an instant I realise what art could mean for us. I don’t mean art that just represents or copies things. Art that does that stops. I see it now. It’s frozen. Oh dear, it is something in your mind that has died and is stuffed.
    My hand is getting shaky but I mustn’t stop. If only I could write! My head hates this awful labour. Like that endless talking that went on about the meaning of time and society and dialectics. I see Julie put her palms to her ears and scream. No wonder. The scream of one who is being murdered. O God, I see it now. She shouldn’t have been there? Nimble-witted but without depth, said the horrible Know-all. But I can’t say any more. I’ll vomit if I do.
    I’m trembling like one who has been running for dear life. Perhaps I have.
6
    Ranald dear, I have a lovely private job on hand. The thought of it gives me the greatest pleasure and it’s secret even from Aunt Phemie. These letters must appear dreadfully gloomy, but I’ll hide them, and some day perhaps we’ll be able to read them together and laugh. The thought of it keeps me going; is like a dance, a healthy country dance. Life will be like that one day. I am quite sure of it. The little letters I do send you now are like that. So they are not really a deception;just a cry to you to come up out of the city on the plain. And the thought that you may be coming soon for even four days! What fresh eggs Aunt Phemie will stuff into you! I chortle. Ran, Ran, hurry up!
    Meantime I shall get on with my job, not merely by helping to clean house for you—we have your room all ready already—but also (my private job) to clean up, to brush away, the shadow from the fields and trees and all the land up to the Wood (the Dark Wood, I call it now) and on across the moor to the burn and perhaps even down to the gorge of the birches. For the murder of that poor old man did cast a shadow. It did affect me pretty much, Ranald. It’s this business of hallucinations. I don’t have them badly at all, in the sense that I am perfectly well aware I have them. Every normal person has them in some degree. I know deep in my own mind that I am not really neurotic, and should any psychiatrist smile at that as my private delusion, I’m not giving a hoot! But I do know that I am somehow highly sensitised. Now and then I get the dreadful frightening feeling that I may be pushed over a border line. Lest something like that should happen—it won’t!