The Great Divorce - Chapters 3 and 4
Chapter 3
‘Now that they were in the light, they were transparent–fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stoood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.Then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known had been perhpas. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our own country that men were ghosts by comparison.’
‘One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.’
Chapter 4
‘A bird ran across in front of me and I envied it. It belonged to that country and was as real as the grass.’
I envy the bird.
‘No need to bother about it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’
‘No. Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That is what it did for me. And that was how everything began.’
‘Personally,’ said the Big Ghost with an emphasis which contradicted the ordinary meaning of the word, ‘Personally, I’d have thought you and I ought to be the other way round. That’s my personal opinion.’
This how I feel…
‘Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.’
How often I try to express this… and how few seem to understand or ‘hear’ it…
‘There are no private affairs,’ said the other.
So true, our sins - even the ones that seem private or hidden - affect others as surely as a stone falling into a pond sends ripples cascading out from it.
‘Come and show me now,’ said the other with laughter in his voice, ‘It will be joy going to the mountains, but there will be plenty of work.’
‘You don’t suppose I’d go with you?’
‘Don’t refuse. You will never get there alone. And I am the one who was sent to you.’
This really resonates… So often we are uncomfortable to go to the ‘high places’… it’s too much work, too uncomfortable… we’d rather get on alone, do it our way… especially if we don’t like the one who is telling us the truth… Yet none of us ‘get there alone’… and so often we insist on the illusion instead of the reality…
