Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
MacDonald, George, 1824-1905
English
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ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBOURHOOD.
BY GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.
NEW YORK
CHAPTER I.
DESPONDENCY AND CONSOLATION.
Before I begin to tell you some of the things I have seen and heard,
in both of which I have had to take a share, now from the compulsion
of my office, now from the leading of my own heart, and now from
that destiny which, including both, so often throws the man who
supposed himself a mere on-looker, into the very vortex of
events--that destiny which took form to the old pagans as a gray
mist high beyond the heads of their gods, but to us is known as an
infinite love, revealed in the mystery of man--I say before I begin,
it is fitting that, in the absence of a common friend to do that
office for me, I should introduce myself to your acquaintance, and I
hope coming friendship. Nor can there be any impropriety in my
telling you about myself, seeing I remain concealed behind my own
words. You can never look me in the eyes, though you may look me in
the soul. You may find me out, find my faults, my vanities, my sins,
but you will not SEE me, at least in this world. To you I am but a
voice of revealing, not a form of vision; therefore I am bold behind
the mask, to speak to you heart to heart; bold, I say, just so much
the more that I do not speak to you face to face. And when we meet
in heaven--well, there I know there is no hiding; there, there is no
reason for hiding anything; there, the whole desire will be
alternate revelation and vision.
I am now getting old--faster and faster. I cannot help my gray
hairs, nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no,
nor the quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being
feeble in the knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my
study. But I have not got used to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom
older than I did at three-and-twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I
feel a good deal younger.--For then I only felt that a man had to
take up his cross; whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him;
and that makes an unspeakable difference.--When my voice quavers, I
feel that it is mine and not mine; that it just belongs to me like
my watch, which does not go well-now, though it went well thirty
years ago--not more than a minute out in a month. And when I feel my
knees shake, I think of them with a kind of pity, as I used to think
of an old mare of my father's of which I was very fond when I was a
lad, and which bore me across many a field and over many a fence,
but which at last came to have the same weakness in her knees that I
have in mine; and she knew it too, and took care of them, and so of
herself, in a wise equine fashion. These things are not me--or _I_,
if the grammarians like it better, (I always feel a strife between
doing as the scholar does and doing as other people do;) they are
not me, I say; I HAVE them--and, please God, shall soon have better.
For it is not a pleasant thing for a young man, or a young woman
either, I venture to say, to have an old voice, and a wrinkled face,
and weak knees, and gray hair, or no hair at all. And if any moral
Philistine, as our queer German brothers over the Northern fish-pond
would call him, say that this is all rubbish, for that we ARE old, I
would answer: "Of all children how can the children of God be old?"
So little do I give in to calling this outside of me, ME, that I
should not mind presenting a minute description of my own person
such as would at once clear me from any suspicion of vanity in so
introducing myself. Not that my honesty would result in the least
from indifference to the external--but from comparative indifference
to the transitional; not to the transitional in itself, which is of
eternal significance and result, but to the particular form of
imperfection which it may have reached at any individual moment of
its infinite progression towards the complete. For no sooner have I
spoken the word NOW, than that NOW is dead and another is dying;
nay, in such a regard, there is no NOW--only a past of which we know
a little, and a future of which we know far less and far more. But I
will not speak at all of this body of my earthly tabernacle, for it
is on the whole more pleasant to forget all about it. And besides, I
do not want to set any of my readers to whom I would have the
pleasure of speaking far more openly and cordially than if they were
seated on the other side of my writing-table--I do not want to set
them wondering whether the vicar be this vicar or that vicar; or
indeed to run the risk of giving the offence I might give, if I were
anything else than "a wandering voice."
I did not feel as I feel now when first I came to this parish. For,
as I have said, I am now getting old very fast. True, I was thirty
when I was made a vicar, an age at which a man might be expected to
be beginning to grow wise; but even then I had much yet to learn.
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