Finally!I found a portal,Which means that I,Though a mere mortal,
Can have adventures,In a magical land,There’s so much to do,Many quests I have planned,
I pass through the portal,Into a place,Unlike my home,A smile appears on my face,
I turn to see mountains,Fields and large trees,Unlike what I’ve known…Is that a village I see?
I hope to see wizards,And heroes and knights,But if there’s any…
One of my favorite ways to spend time as a kid was to play pretend. Sometimes, I would pretend to fight with lightsabers with my brother — as the oldest sister, I had the natural right to decide who would be who, and, of course, I always got to be the Jedi. On other days, we would invite our two best friends over, and we’d run around the house, which had become Hogwarts Castle in the blink of an…
Never let anyone tell you that having an imaginary world into adulthood is insane or that you must grow out of it or put it behind you.
About Ejuxria and Gombroon: GLIMPSES OF DAY-DREAMLAND.
by Rev. F. Jacox, written in 1871
[I've annotated this, broken up a few more paragraphs, & taken the liberty of translating the French phrases. At times he seems altogether too enamoured of his own erudition. - A. Temple]
At a very early period of the childhood of Hartley Coleridge, he imagined himself to foresee a time when, as his brother tells us, a small cataract would burst forth in the field next his -- or rather his uncle Southey's -- house; the stream thus created would soon have its banks thickly peopled; a region, a realm would arise; and the result would be an island-continent, to be called Ejuxria, with its own attendant isles -- a new Australia, the history and geography of which were at one time as familiar, to say the least, to Hartley's younger brother and affectionate biographer, Mr. Derwent Coleridge, as any portion (he had almost, in his faith in Ejuxria, written it "any other portion") of the habitable globe. The details have gradually faded from the survivor's memory, and fitly enough, as he says, no written record remains (though an elaborate map of the country was once in existence), from which they can be recovered.
The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath,
And these are of them. Whither have they vanished ? --
Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted
As breath into the wind. Would they had stay'd!
Taken as whole, the Ejuxrian world -- this is Mr. Derwent Coleridge's account of it -- presented a complete analog to the world of fact, so far as it was known to Hartley, complete in all its parts; furnishing a theatre and scene of action, with dramatis personae, and suitable machinery, in which, day after day, for the space of long years, he went on evolving the complicated drama of existence. "There were many nations, continental and insular, each with its separate history, civil, ecclesiastical, and literary, its forms of religion and government, and specific national character." The names of Ejuxrian generals and statesmen were familiar in the biographer's ear as household words. He witnessed the jar of faction in his brother's realm, and had to trace the course of sedition. He lived to see changes of government, a great progress of public opinion, and a new order of things.
For Ejuxria, though a cloudland, was not merely a land of passing clouds; though a dreamland, it was not compact of dreams that are gone in a night. To the brothers, one of whom had created, and both of whom believed in it, it was for a large space of their childhood a continuing city. When at length, however, a sense of unreality was forced upon Hartley, and he "felt himself obliged to account for his knowledge of, and connection with, this distant land," like Mahomet and other self-asserting seers, he resorted to a preternatural medium, or consecrated agency, and got up a story," borrowed from the Arabian Nights," of a great bird, by which he was transported to and fro. "But he recurred to the explanations with great reluctance, and got rid of them as quickly as possible." His brother once asked him how it was that his absence on these occasions was not observed; but Hartley was angry and mortified, and the sceptic never repeated the experiment. Hardly a sceptic, either; for by his own report the questioner was willingly beguiled.
Hartley's usual mode of introducing the subject was -- "Derwent, I have had letters and papers from Ejuxria." Then would come his budget of news, "with appropriate reflections, his words flowing on in an exhaustless stream, and his countenance bearing witness to the inspiration," so Mr. Derwent Coleridge inclines to call it, by which he was agitated. That he was utterly unconscious of invention, his brother is persuaded; and the latter believes that Hartley continued the habit mentally, from time to time, after he left school, and of course had no longer a confidant; "in this as in many other ways continuing a child;" Nature preserving for him, by individual right,
"A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks."
De Quincey too, in early childhood, had an Ejuxria, or imaginary kingdom of his own, to govern, the name he gave to which was Gombroon. And soon he found how uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; for his elder brother, not content with tyrannising over the counterpart dreamland himself had created, insisted on interfering with the internal economy of the realm aforesaid, so that at every step Thomas had to contend for the honour and independence of his islanders. What though the world in question was purely aerial, -- were all the sufferings and the combats absolutely moonshine? -- to the child-creator of Gombroon that dream-kingdom, which had risen like a vapour from his own brain, was distressingly real, when thus the liberties of its denizens were imperilled. Hear him retrace his emotions at this juncture, -- after mooting the suggestion that as the realm was purely the efflux of his fancy, surely by the simple fiat of his will it might be for ever dissolved, and his distresses at the same time be disposed of at once and for aye.
"Ah! but no; I had contracted obligations to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke, and in secret truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs, these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigour of reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite."
For Mr. de Quincey strenuously contends that to make a strife overwhelming by a thousandfold to the feelings, it must not deal with great material interests, but such as rise into the world of dreams, and act upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments. Great was his right to insist on this, so large a portion of whose life was spent in dream-world -- not forgetting the dreams, now sublime, now appalling, at one time rapturous with ecstasy of bliss, at another hideous with loathsome horrors, of the English Opium-eater, as such. In the course of a long life, it may be doubted whether anything was ever to him more intensely real, more substantially and objectively true, than that exacting realm, of imagination all compact, the far-off island of Gombroon.
More daydream lands....
Little Maggie Tulliver, in "George Eliot's" masterly picture of child-life, when crossed in her dearest wishes, and so taught very early what a disappointing world this is of ours, could think of no comfort, we read, but to sit down by the holly, or wander by the hedgerow, and "fancy it was all different, refashioning her little world into just what she should like it to be. Maggie's was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium." Poor Maggie works one listener at least, and that is Lucy Deane, into a delighted semi-belief in her stories about the live things they come upon by accident -- how Mrs. Earwig had a wash at home, and one of her children had fallen into the hot copper, for which reason she was running so fast to fetch the doctor -- et catera, et catera, omniana, ejusmodi, figments of fancy such as pile up cloud-strata in the realms of Ejuxria and Gombroon.
Although truth is pronounced by Macaulay [in his essay on "Milton", look it up, it's good] to be essential to poetry, it is, he maintains, the truth of madness: the reasonings are just, but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made, he says, everything ought to be consistent; but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. "Hence, of all people, children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality."
The author of John Halifax [Dinah Craik, also the author of The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak and compiler of The Fairy Book with lesser-known classical fairytales], in one of her prose essays, remarks on the existence of many children of vivid imagination, who, even to themselves, can hardly distinguish between what they see and what they invent, and have to be taught, by hard and patient lessons, the difference between truth and falsehood. She proffers the instance of a little fellow she knew, scarcely past the lisping-age, who used day after day and week after week to relate to mother and nurse continuous biographies of his "brother William," and a certain "Crocus bold" (both equally fabulous characters) [Crocus Bold comes from a poem, "Spring Flowers", by Mary Howitt]; how he used to meet them on the sea-shore, and go for a sail with them -- how the "Crocus bold" fell out of the boat, and "my brother William "jumped overboard, and fished him up again; and how they two lived together in a bay the child named -- a real bay -- and "sold lobsters," etc., etc. Amid all the laughter created by this story, told -- Mrs. Craik bears witness -- with the gravest countenance by the young narrator, who was exceedingly displeased if you doubted his veracity for a moment, it produced an uneasy sensation, not unlike what one would feel in listening to a monomaniac, who tells you earnestly how he
"Sees a face you cannot see, -- "
though perhaps it is, he avers, looking over your shoulder at this very time. Or rather, perhaps, as the essayist further suggests, like "that curious bewilderment with which one hears the statement of a Modern Spiritualist, probably in all respects but this a very sensible, rational person, who relates 'communications,' as lengthy as they are ludicrous, from the invisible world, informs you, and expects you to believe, that he has seen spirit-wreaths moved from head to head by spirit-hands, and felt soft, dead-cold fingers clasping his, under his respectable dining-table. You cannot deny these things without accusing good people of voluntary mendacity; you have, therefore, no resource but to set it all down to 'the force of imagination.'" (Essay on the Age of Gold. (Macmillan, 1860.)
Lily Floris, in the story of Quite Alone [a soap-opera-like dime novel that makes the trials of Sara Crewe in A Little Princess look like a minor inconvenience], -- being pent up in a Paris "pension" [girls' school] of the strictest, gloomiest type, resorts to that last resort of cramped, cribbed childhood, the mental creation of a dream-world, wherein to live, and move, and have her being. In default, we read, of something tangible to love, she elected to build up a world of her own, and to people it with creatures of her own imagination, and to dwell among them, and love them very dearly. "Her world was totally at war with Mercator's projection. It was a very puerile Utopia, the most frivolous of Formosas, a highly babyish New Atlantis -- a silly nonsensical world, if you like; but she believed firmly in it, and her devotion to its inhabitants was unbounded. If she were punished, somebody in the Ideal World came to comfort her, and to show her a clue to work her way out of the labyrinth of a tangled task. If she were unhappy, she was invited to festivals and picnics in the Imaginary Land." Any little broken ray of sunshine that had fallen on the child's pathway before she was immured in that dismal prison-house, was now worked up by her plastic imagination into the blaze of light that irradiated her Ejuxria or Gombroon.
The habit of "making out" interests for themselves, common enough in children who have none in actual life, is said to have been very strong in Charlotte Bronte. The whole family, according to one who knew them, used to "make out" histories and invent characters and events.
A surrounding atmosphere of unhappiness is apt to quicken and exalt this compensative tendency in the child's mind. Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, in her autobiography, describes her mind, in early girlhood, as far off in Dreamland, while she seemed absorbed in prescribed studies, -- "living in an ideal world, which I peopled according to my fancy, and where, in truth, I sought to indemnify myself for my unhappiness by an imaginative creation." A previous chapter affords an example of Mary Anne Gallon's [Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's maiden name] figments of fancy in the home of her restless childhood. She had got hold of two skulls for "playthings" (save the mark! and bless the child!), and "in the day-dream," she writes, "in which I was so often wont to indulge, I constituted these two skulls into those of Anthony Babington, whom I supposed the noble defender of Mary [Queen of Scots], and John Polly, the mean betrayer of the whole plot to Elizabeth [Queen Elizabeth I], I gradually attached a long history to each, beginning with their childhood, and imagining how, little by little, noble daring, and compassion, and self-devotion were nurtured in the one, and meanness, and selfishness, and the full-blown traitor's character were developed in the other." She even wrote, in two little books, the history she had affixed to each : a history which thus became to her most real.
The two Italian peasant-children, Luigi and Teresa, in an episode of one of M. Dumas' voluminous romances [The Count of Monte Cristo], abandon themselves without restraint to the fancies prompted by their respective dispositions, -- the boy expatiating in day-dreams of himself as a sea-captain, a general, and governor of a province, -- the girl, as a bella donna, in lustrous attire, and surrounded by liveried servitors. They could not but believe that such things were, which were to them most dear. "Then, when they had passed the day forming castles in the air, they separated their flocks, and descended from the elevation of their dreams to the reality of their humble position."
There are Mr. Disraeli's little Lord Cadurcis and Venetia (entire novel online here), again, who, wandering in the park, are said to have made there a little world for themselves, of which no one dreamed; for Venetia had poured forth all her Arcadian lore into her playmate's ear, and acted together the adventures of romance, under the fond names of Musidorus and Philoclea. "Unwearied was the innocent sport of their virgin imaginations" -- making her mother's place Arcadia, and his Macedon; while the intervening woods figured as the forest of Thessaly, and the breezy downs were the heights of Pindus. When it was time for his small lordship to be taken home, "they parted with an embrace in the woods of Thessaly, and Musidorus strolled home with a heavy heart to his Macedonian realm. Parted from Venetia, the magic suddenly seemed to cease, and Musidorus was instantly transformed into the little Lord Cadurcis, exhausted by the unconscious efforts of his fancy," as well as depressed by the separation from his sweet companion, and shrinking from the unpoetical reception which at the best awaited him in his ungenial home, -- the original of Plantagenet Lord Cadurcis being as readers will scarcely need to be reminded, no other than George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron [Talk about your queer connections!]
Sir Walter Scott [author of Ivanhoe among other things], in his too-brief Autobiography, relates of his sister Anne, who died in early life, -- his junior by about a year, -- that she lived "in an ideal world which she had framed to herself by the force of imagination." Of little Walter himself, in his invalid childhood, one of his old schoolfellows bears record that he used to interest them all by describing the "visions," as he called them, which he had lying alone on the floor or sofa, when kept from going to church on a Sunday by ill health. "Child as I was, I could not help being delighted with his description of the glories he had seen -- his misty and sublime sketches of the regions above, which he had visited in his trance."
Of Jane Taylor, not the least gifted of a gifted family, her brother Isaac observes, that it was evident to all who took note of her that, even from her third or fourth year, the little girl inhabited a fairy-land, and was perpetually occupied with the imaginary interests of her teeming fancy. The author of Dutch Pictures [same bloke who wrote Quite Alone] relates how a little dead sister of his used to draw what the two called fairyland on her slate. It might be, after all, but a vile childish scrawl, done over a half smeared-out game of oughts and crosses, with a morsel of slate-pencil : "Yet I and she believed in the fairy-land she drew. We could pluck the golden fruit on the boughs, and hear the silver-voiced birds, and see the fairy elves with their queen (drawn very possibly with a head like a deformed oyster) dancing beneath the big round moon upon the yellow sands."
A thoughtful essayist on Dante has remarked that only those who take the trouble to understand how the credulous faith of children in their own imaginings may be systematised with rigid metaphysical subtlety at a certain epoch of the human mind, can transport themselves back into the fairy-land of fancy and devotion. "Yet, without this knowledge, they must not hope to understand Dante."
In the boyhood of Bernardin de St. Pierre has been recognised a power like that which made the infancy of Hartley Coleridge so remarkable, of living in a world, visionary and yet methodical, of his own. His imagination being stimulated by reading "Robinson Crusoe," he soon invented an island of his own; "but not content with the solitary existence of his model, he peopled it with the sort of persons that he thought he should like to live with. Already in this boyish fancy we see the germ of 'Paul and Virginia,' where the enchanted island that presents the scenery of the Isle of France is tenanted by persons who are life-like but impossible."
The elder Humboldt, in one of his letters to the most cherished of his correspondents, assures her that the power she possessed as a child, of creating phantasies of objects, whose existence she wished or expected, belonged to him also from his earliest infancy -- " from my sixth year, I think." The habit seems to have been first excited in her by the longing for a friend, and the reading of Clarissa; but in him it was caused by no outward circumstance that he could remember. "The objects which passed through my mind in this manner were very numerous and various ; but one has remained with me from the time of my childhood till now [1824], and will probably so remain until my death. If I lie awake at night, ride or walk alone, or at any time am unoccupied in my thoughts, this phantom of my childhood stalks before me, ever changing its form, but still ever the same." The philosophic Baron adds, that as this is an object unlike any of the figures which he meets in life, it disappears before the realities of a work-day world; but that whether it come or go, define itself or dislimn, he is ever heartily thankful for this power of peopling his thoughts.
Niebuhr in early boyhood conceived the idea of a kingdom (which he called Plattengland), drew maps of it, gave laws, declared war, and made peace. His father, the well-known traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, used to relate his travels to him; and young Barthold's eager imagination embodied his father's descriptions in animated figures. "By a power of transferring himself into those countries, he painted to himself the manner of life, and their local circumstances, agreeably to his own conception." In his later boyish days also, we read, he often lived in these dreams; and his castles in the air consisted of colonies which he planted in those parts, regulating them according to his own notions of ideal perfection.
A Westminster Reviewer of his Life and Letters suggests that the physical aspect of the country he was born and bred in, being "hideous," he "drew maps instead of pictures," and sought within the beauty and interest that were a-wanting without. This account of his constructive feats in the sphere of Ejuxria and Gombroon is added : "As a boy, Barthold Niebuhr had an imaginary kingdom of his own, called Low England, the wars, legislation, and universal interests of which he conducted with much energy and wisdom. It was a very real affair to him; and the old Greeks and Romans were, apparently, neither more nor less real." His faculty as an historian was probably rather fostered and enlivened than injured by early addiction to all this coinage of the brain.
Goethe and his mother were wonderfully en rapport in the construction of baseless fabrics which both virtually took for real. Great was her faculty for story-telling and story-making; and we have her own word for it, that, in the myths she conjured up for the delectation of her children, she was almost a more fervent believer than they. "I was as eager for the hours of story-telling as the children themselves; I was quite curious about the future course of my own improvisation, and any invitation which interrupted these evenings was disagreeable." There she sat, and there Wolfgang -- the future creator of Fausts, and Gretchens, and Mignons -- held her with his large black eyes; and when the fate of one of his favourites was not according to his fancy, the mother saw the angry veins swell on his temples, while he strove to repress his tears. "And when I made a pause," she says, "for the night, promising to continue the story next day, I was certain that he would in the meanwhile think it out for himself, and so he often stimulated my imagination." His grandmother, who made a great pet of him, was the confidant of all his ideas as to how the story would (urn out, and as she repeated these to his mother, the latter turned the story according to these hints, and Wolfgang was all delight at the veritable fulfilment of his own conceptions, in the reality of which he now therefore believed more distinctly than ever.
When Sir William Jones was a schoolboy at Harrow, he, together with Dr. Parr and Bishop Bennett (of Cloyne), his chiefest cronies there, indulged in a systematic construction of a quasi-Ejuxria or Gombroon. The three boys divided the fields near Harrow, according to a map of Greece, into states and kingdoms; each fixing upon one as his own particular realm: wars were got up and got over, "and the "young statesmen held councils, made vehement harangues, and composed memorials, all doubtless very boyish, but calculated to fill their minds with ideas of legislation and civil government." The earth has bubbles as the water hath, and these are of them. Blowing bubbles is a species of world making, in the blower's view of it; and some of these radiant spheres are long ere they burst.
Nor is this state of mind or feeling confined to childhood. Men are but children of a large growth; and in some the imagination retains its vivid power to the last. Saint Francis of Assisi has been called an absolute prodigy of faith ; especially of faith in himself: for whatever he saw in the camera lucida of his own mind he received implicitly, observes Sir James Stephen, "as the genuine reflection of some external reality. Every metaphor with which he dallied became to him an actual personage, to be loved or to be hated. To all inanimate beings he ascribed a personality and a sentient nature, in something more than a sport of fancy."
Hawthorne's [Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter] correspondent P. is described as living in a world of his own, and of his own making too; all which is suggested to be not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, developed with such morbid energy that he "beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence."
Jean Jacques [Rousseau, a French philosopher who believed in a more naturalistic approach to education] dilates in his Confessions on the resource he had to a cloudworld of unrealities when this world of realities chilled and repulsed him: he flung himself into what he calls the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing in existence that was worthy of ecstasy, he sought an outlet for his transports "in an ideal world that my imagination created and soon peopled with beings after my own heart".
Here he enjoyed continual ecstasies. His Ejuxria was the home of perfect beings. He forgot altogether the human race, in favour of the Gombroon he could and did people, according to his own choices, with beings as celestial in beauty as in virtue, -- with steadfast, tender, faithful friends, such as in vain he looked for in this visible diurnal sphere. In the world of his own creation he now lived, and moved, and had his being; and it, to him, was the one thing real, where either he must live or have no life. So again in Les Reveries -- a sequel to Les Confessions -- he tells of the delight with which he communed with the imaginary beings, just as if these beings really existed. "They existed for me as I believed in them," he adds, "and I believed they would never betray or abandon me; they endured throughout each of my bad times, and were enough to make me forget them." Quite early in life Rousseau had acquired a pronounced taste for this kind of day-dreaming. As a mere lad he had been wont to calm his developing sensibility, and seek a refuge from the strife of every-day existence, by fastening his imagination on scenes and subjects that had interested him in his reading, -- to recall these, vary them, combine them anew, and so thoroughly appropriate them that he became one of the persons conceived of, and with their history and interests sought to identify his own. It was an apprenticeship in the author's craft, by which he was one day to signalise himself in creative art.
For genius, when it takes to writing fiction, will more or less vividly "realise" to itself the ideal beings it summons into existence. It is not free and happy in its creation unless it in some sort believe in them. To apply a fragment from a fragmentary drama, -- Find me a book of fables; he, whose world
Grows in his thoughts, methinks, alone is happy.
When Beaumarchais [author of the original plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro on which the operas are based] was censured for the prosaic realism which marks the talk of his characters, he answered that it was not his fault; that all the time he was writing the piece he was engaged in the most lively conversation with his dramatis persona; that while seated at his writing-table he kept exclaiming, "Figaro, watch out, the Count knows everything! Ah! Countess, what imprudence! -- Quickly, save yourself, little page;" and then he wrote down their answers, whatever they chanced to be -- nothing more. This struck Mendelssohn -- [whose nature was as far off as possible] to Beaumarchais -- as "both true and charming"; and he uses the anecdote to illustrate his doctrine, enforced in a letter to Herr Devrient, that an opera can only become thoroughly musical, and thoroughly dramatic, by an intense feeling of life in all the characters.
Charlotte Bronte used to read to her sisters, and they to her, once or twice a week, what each had written of the stories they were engaged upon -- criticism being invited and expected. But the author of Jane Eyre told Mrs. Gaskell that the remarks made had seldom any effect in inducing her to alter her work, so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality. The characters were her companions in quiet hours : the interest of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her life, when her sisters were dead and gone: "but too frequently she could not write, could not see her people, nor hear them speak; a great mist of headache had blotted them out;" and then they were non-existent to her. Like Richardson in the case of Clarissa, she was appealed to, urgently, to alter the catastrophe which closes [her novel] Villette. Her father importuned her to make it a happy ending. But the death of M. Emanuel at sea appears to have been stamped on her imagination, till it assumed the distinct force of reality; and she "could no more alter her fictitious ending than if they had been facts which she was relating." Villette end happily? How could it? as Mr. Roscoe asks: Monsieur Paul Emanuel really did die at sea. There was no help for it, -- he would have been a puppet, not a personage, could she have saved him or not, or just as she pleased. Once endowed with a life of his own, his life was no longer in her hands.
Mr. Dickens has acquainted the world with the origin of the main idea of his Tale of Two Cities, -- that idea having been first conceived by him at the time of his acting, with his children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of the Frozen Deep, a strong desire possessing him to embody it in his own person; and as the idea, he says, "became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself."
The practical importance is obvious of a certain intensity of belief, on the author's part, in the reality of his creations. If void of such belief himself, he will hardly succeed in impressing a conviction of it on his readers. In proportion to the liveliness of his belief in his characters as real people, will be the interest he takes in dealing with them; and upon that will greatly depend the degree of interest he can expect to excite in his readers.
When Dr. Norman Macleod commenced writing The Old Lieutenant and his Son, his intention was merely to occupy a chapter or two in Good Words with a life-sketch derived from memories of the past. But the sketch grew upon him, he says; persons, and things, and scenes, came crowding out of the darkness, and while he honestly wished to mould them for practical good, he felt all the while more possessed by them than possessing them. "My own half-creations became my tyrants, and so I was driven on from chapter to chapter," etc. Years before the author of George Geith became really popular, a story of hers was thus appraised by one of the most competent of critics: the plot, said he, was involved, eccentric, improbable; but the characters were evidently drawn by a mind which can realise fictitious characters with the same sort of minute intensity with which Dr. Stanley [Henry Morton Stanley of "Dr. Livingston, I Presume"] can realise some bygone scene of history, or Mr. Holman Hunt conceive the dying agonies of a goat starving in the desert.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was probably drawing to some extent on his own experience when he makes a brother author, "my friend Oberon," declare to him: "You cannot conceive what an effect the composition of these tales has had on me. . . . I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me by aping the realities of life." They had drawn him aside, he says, from the beaten path of the world, and led him into a strange sort of solitude -- a solitude in the midst of men -- where nobody wished for what he wished for, or thought and felt as he did. That solitude was over-peopled -- but with shadows; and to him the shadows were more real than the outside world, that not being of imagination all compact.
Balzac is probably the most remarkable example on record of passionate belief in the reality of his every character and every incident. "In mere intensity of imagination," writes a Saturday Reviewer, -- " in the power of making fictitious personages into realities for the mind which conceived them -- no one has ever excelled Balzac, if any one has equalled him." He was, in M. de Sainte-Beuve's words, intoxicated with his own work. The world he had half taken from observation, half made " out of his own head," -- the characters of every type and class which he had endowed with life, -- were confounded by him with the world and personages of reality. He saw them, chatted with them, was for ever quoting them to you as persons he and you knew quite well. He had clothed them so palpably and so definitely in flesh and bones, that each was to him a presence that was not to be put by. In moments of enthusiasm he would marshal them around him, -- a throng of beings to him instinct with life, because by him informed with life, -- by him, without whose life they had not been.
To Balzac indeed may exceptionally be applied the lines of Wordsworth, intended of no such person:
And being still unsatisfied with aught
Of dimmer character, he thence attained
An active power to fasten images
Upon his brain: and on their pictured lines
Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
The liveliness of dreams.
I've decided to share with you a couple of things about Caldera of Inana, or as it is commonly called - Sea of Inana.
The sea itself is roughly the size of Baltic Sea and there are twenty three inhabited islands on it. When it comes to altitude the surface is between low to middle sections of Heaven. The climate is temperate, it rains quite often, the sky tends to be murky.
Technology is about nineteenth century level and this is low magic area. There are some really dangerous beasts living on the islands, but only within abandoned, unprotected areas.
Not a worst place to live, when you have certain income and live in protected areas. Most people know how to read and medicine is accessible, provided you have money. But there are also huge issues. There is vary visible gender division. Granted, it's not a worst place, as women have access to education, healthcare, some basic law protection, they can inherit all types of possession and they can work in payed jobs. But the culture is patriarchal and androcentric - you know this, I don't have to explain. Everything is very gendered (except names), clothes, toys, social expectations, boys and girls go to separate schools, have very different and so on. Other gender issues aren't even recognized.
There are also issues of colorism, partially overlapping with class stratification. There is no welfare. You need permits to get from one zone to the other. Most inhabitants don't have political rights. On the plus side, they don't lack religious freedom, mostly because in this particular society religion doesn't much tie to anything in particular. Also no slavery in protected areas (save for exploitation).
Unprotected, abandoned areas... that's a different story - you don't want to live there. There's poverty, crime, unrest hit periodically, slavers from different parts of the world also hunt in those places, usually for children.
There is also interesting bit of trivia I'd like to share. When you meet a person from Sea of Inana, you can tell when (part of the year) they were born just by knowing what their name references. So you can meet dude called Little Rosie (names are not gendered), and know that he was born in April. Also names referencing colors are a thing. Baby Blue is totally available name.
