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Updated: May 1, 2025
To-day seemed an unreality, an idle impertinence; the real was that long-buried past which gave its meaning to all around me, touching the night with infinite pathos. Best of all, one's own being became lost to consciousness; the mind knew only the phantasmal forms it shaped, and was at peace in vision. I slept little, and was very early on deck, scanning by the light of dawn a mountainous coast.
Nothing but sinister memories and vague alarms presented themselves to his imagination. The atmosphere, heavy and brooding from the long exclusion of the outer air, seemed to weigh upon him with the density of matter, and to afford the stuff out of which phantasmal bodies perpetually took shape and, as he half persuaded himself, substance.
I remember a young girl, who having taken up a hazel-stick freshly cut, could not relax her hold of it; and when it was wrenched away from her by force, was irresistibly attracted towards it, repossessed herself of it, and, after holding it a few minutes, was cast into a kind of trance, in which she beheld phantasmal visions.
Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, from such works as Defoe's quasi-historical account of the Plague year, which probably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time than any authentic history, through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal creations of imaginative genius, such as the old "Arabian Nights" or the modern "Shaving of Shagpat."
But when the general Life-element becomes so unspeakably phantasmal as under Louis XV., it is difficult for any man to be real; to be other than a play-actor, more or less eminent, and artistically dressed.
I should have driven right into those half-eaten things. If your sister had not come! They had great holes in them, Bellows, and ... Never mind. But it was ghastly!" For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind to the world around him.
I was sanguine of good result from skill more consummate than mine, and more especially devoted to diseases of the mind. I summoned the first advisers. In vain! in vain! And the cause of this direful shock? Not this time could it be traced to some evil spell, some phantasmal influence.
When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent. The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking-horse.
He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmal wires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires one anxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; that the Soul itself had its elusive "wireless," and forever carried and gave out and received its countless messages if only the fellow-Soul had learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runic Code.
More strange still, I recognise nothing of a past before then, and no one comes out of that past and claims recognition of me. "This I remember in a dim phantasmal way as the very beginning of things: my getting into a coach in a white mist. Even in that I constantly feel a doubt that my imagination has been playing false with memory.
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