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210 |
LILITH |
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His advice did not recommend itself : why haste to encounter measureless delay? If not to protect the children, why go at all ? Alas, even now I believed him only enough to ask him questions, not to obey him !
' Tell me first, Mr. Raven,' I said, ' why, of all places, you have shut her up there! The night I ran from your house, it was immediately into that closet! '
' The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than any or every other place.'
' But,' I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand, how is it then that, when you please, you take from that same door a whole book where I saw and felt only a part of one ? The other part, you have just told me, stuck through into your library : when you put it again on the shelf, will it not again stick through into that ? Must not then the two places, in which parts of the same volume can at the same moment exist, lie close together ? Or can one part of the book be in space, or somewhere, and the other out of space, or nowhere ?'
' I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you,' he answered; ' but there is no provision in you for understanding it. Not merely, therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it is inapprehensible by you. Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself. At the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you not only do not, but cannot understand. You think you understand them, but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them. You accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them : they are there, and have unavoidable relations with you ! The fact is, no man understands |
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