The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII

Dedication TO VESTIGIA It is a constant thought of mine that what we write is often a commendation of, or expostulation with the friends of our youth, and that even if we survive all our friends we continue to prolong or to amend conversations that took place before our five-and-twentieth year. Perhaps this book has been written because a number of young men and women, you and I among the number, met nearly forty years ago in London and in Paris to discuss mystical philosophy. You with your beauty and your learning and your mysterious gifts were held by all in affection, and though, when the first draft of this dedication was written, I had not seen you for more than thirty years, nor knew where you were nor what you were doing, and though much had happened since we copied the Jewish Schemahamphorasch with its seventy-two Names of God in Hebrew characters, it was plain that I must dedicate my book to you. All other students who were once friends or friends' friends were dead or estranged. Florence Farr coming to her fiftieth year, dreading old age and fading beauty, had made a decision we all dreamt of at one time or another, and accepted a position as English teacher in a native school in Ceylon that she might study oriental thought, and had died there. Another had become a Buddhist monk, and some ten years ago a traveller of my acquaintance found him in a Burmese monastery. A third lived through that strange adventure, perhaps the strangest of all adventures -- Platonic love. When he was a child his nurse said to him -- 'An Angel bent over your bed last night', and in his seventeenth year he awoke to see the phantom of a beautiful woman at his bedside. Presently he gave himself up to all kinds of amorous adventures, until at last, in I think his fiftieth year but when he had still all his physical vigour, he thought 'I do not need women but God.' Then he and a very good, charming, young fellow-student fell in love with one another and though he could only keep down his passion with the most bitter struggle, they lived together platonically, and this they did, not from prejudice, for I think they had none, but from a clear sense of something to be attained by what seemed a most needless trampling of the grapes of life. She died, and he survived her but a little time during which he saw her in apparition and attained through her certain of the traditional experiences of the saint. He was my close friend, and had he lived I would have asked him to accept the dedication of a book I could not expect him to approve, for in his later life he cared for little but what seemed to him a very simple piety. We all, so far as I can remember, differed from ordinary students of philosophy or religion through our belief that truth cannot be discovered but may be revealed, and that if a man do not lose faith, and if he go through certain preparations, revelation will find him at the fitting moment. I remember a learned brassfounder in the North of England who visited us occasionally, and was convinced that there was a certain moment in every year which, once known, brought with it 'The Summum Bonum, the Stone of the Wise'. But others, for it was clear that there must be a vehicle or symbol of communication, were of opinion that some messenger would make himself known, in a railway train let us say, or might be found after search in some distant land. I look back to it as a time when we were full of a phantasy that has been handed down for generations, and is now an interpretation, now an enlargement of the folk-lore of the villages. That phantasy did not explain the world to our intellects which were after all very modern, but it recalled certain forgotten methods of meditation and chiefly how so to suspend the will that the mind became automatic, a possible vehicle for spiritual beings. It carried us to what we had learned to call Hodos Chameliontos. II Some were looking for spiritual happiness or foPaul, Catherine E. is the author of 'The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII', published 2008 under ISBN 9780684807331 and ISBN 0684807335.