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⇒ Cover ⇒ Preface ⇒ Introduction ⇒ The visit ⇒ Weymouth map c.1930 ⇒ Portland map c.1930 ⇒ Works quoted ⇒ Postface |
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A visit to the Weymouth Sands of John Cowper Powys [ ⇒ continue... ] |
There is so much extreme pain in the world, that all the living entities who are free from it have every reason to be thrillingly relieved. |
DESOLATION |
In every man's life there are moments when a desolation takes possession of him which resembles the terrible look which a dead planet might turn upon a lonely voyager travelling through space. At such a moment the heart feels as if an abyss of hopelessness had suddenly been revealed to it through some ghastly crack or crevasse in the buoyant etheric expanse. And it seems to him then as if, at some grim signal, what he had really known all the time had been relentlessly shown him, the ancient cosmogonic jest, the old unredeemed treachery. Like an infinitely forlorn face, stripped of all comfort, this ghastly vision of things limns itself against the surrounding nothingness. Nature has piled up all her resources to hide the yawning void through which this frozen look bids us despair. Viaduct after rainbow-viaduct have our own hearts thrown across this fissure in the familiar landscape, but perhaps it will only be when the Original Jester himself repents Him of His Joke and ceases to cry "Judy! Judy! Judy!" across our shining sands that that look out of the void will melt away. Or perhaps — |
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