Now it was time to return to Boston. The school must open soon. In the bustle of preparation the day he was seven passed unnoticed even by himself. Newburyport departed—Boston came.
VI
Boston
As one in tranquillity gazes into the crystal depths called Memory, in search of sights and sounds and colors long since physically passed out from what is otherwise called memory; when one is intent, not upon recalling but upon reentering, he finds a double motion setting in. While out of the gray surface-obscurity of supposed oblivion, there emerges to his view, as through a thinning haze, a broad vision assuming the color and movement of a life once lived, of a world once seen and felt to be real, so likewise, the intensive soul moves eagerly forward descending through intervening atmospheric depths toward this oncoming solid reality of time and place, a reality growing clearer, more colorful, more vibrant, more alluring, more convincing—filling the eye, the ear with sound and color and movement, with broad expanses, with minute details, with villages and cities, farms and work shops, men and women densely gathered or widely scattered, and children, little children always and everywhere. So moving, the two great illusions, the two dreams of the single dreamer, accelerating, rush onward, and vanish both into a single life which is but a dream;—the dream of the past enfolding and possessing the dreamer of today; the dreamer of today enveloping, entering and possessing the dream-reality of the past; all within the inscrutable stillness of a power unknown, within which we float, with our all, and believe ourselves real. We believe in our reality in our strenuous hours, in our practical doings, in our declamatory moments, and even in our hours of silence.
In sleep there come images before us, floating by, irretrievable, or steadfastly convincing; and these we speak of casually as dreams. We are willing even to extend the idea of dream to man’s ambition. We say such or such a man had or has dreams of empire, of dominion, of achievement, of fulfilment of this or that sort. And occasionally we acknowledge, upon information, that such dream had taken full possession not of a man we read about, or see in the plenitude of his power, but that the dream arose within a child, in broad daylight—as night-dreams do in their way—and aroused in him a passionate desire.
We do not associate the idea of dream with our strenuous hours of thought and deed in the selfsame broad daylight. Nor do we see the stars at noon—but they are there. So is a dream there, within every human, ever—day and night unceasingly.
We impeach the dream idea, calling certain men “Dreamers.” We do this in derision—much as the pot might call the kettle black. We do not suspect that we could not put one foot forth before the other were we not dreaming; so artificial and sophisticated are we in our practical moments. And it is even so as we forget that each of us was once a child; even as we banish the thought, as crude, that out of that very child we have grown inevitably to be what we are; that the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the reactions, the waking dreams of that child have governed and determined us, willy-nilly, through the course of our lives and careers with compelling power—that what the child accepted we accept; that what the child rejected we reject.
Thus from the abysm of Memory’s stillness, that child comes into being within Life’s dream, within the dream of eternal time and space; and in him we behold what we were and still are. Environment may influence but it cannot alter. For it is the child in multiple and in multiple series that creates the flowing environment of thought and deed that shall continuously mature in its due time. It is the moving child-in-multiple of long ago that created for us the basic environment within which we now live. Thus in a memory-mirror may we rediscover ourselves. Expecting to find therein a true reflection of ourselves as we believe we are, the image dissolves as the features of a long forgotten child confront us. Deny him, we dare not.
Turning about from self-contemplation we find children everywhere. We see the tidal wave of children moving on and on, we partly under their dominion, they partly under ours. But theirs is the new, ours
