The Detroit times. [volume] (Detroit, Mich.) 1903-1920, 1916-08-30
Intervals
BY DR.. FRANK CRANE
Copyright. 1915. BY Frank Crane)

The other day | caught you sitting
with your hands fallen in your lap and
your eyes looking at nothing. far away.
When | spoke to you, you came back to
earth with visible effort. When ask
ed you of what you had been thinking
you could not tell. 1t was lust nothing"
But know those moments. They are
those rare moments when the soul finds
the cage-door of reality open and escapes.
What we see or hear or feel in those
flights we cannot tell when we return to
the usual. II Is all too different, too
dreamlike in its stuff TO De put into
words
But for all its tenuous quality, that is
our most real experience. 1t is then, in
entire suspension of the will, we drop
the reins on the horses neck and ride
where our deepest instinct chooses to
ramble. We do not act, nor think, nor
feel, we simply Are.
II is at such an instant you should have
your portrait made. 1t was said of
Giorgione that his skill lay in perceiving,
as the theme OF his pictures, such
"music-like intervals of our existence, life
itself conceived as a sort Of listening to
music"
Walter Pater speaks of our being sur
prised at the unexpected blessedness of
what may seem our least important part
of time, because at such times, the stress
of our Servile, everyday effectiveness be-
ing relaxed the happier powers in things
without US are permitted free passage,
and have their way with US.
We cannot relate what befalls us in
such interludes, for the simple reason
that then We are pure soul; and after
all that has been written about the soul
it can yet only be expressed with the
finger on the lip, by the perfect eloquence
of silence, as Tennyson has put it in
happy line,
And would that could utter
The thoughts that come 10 me.
which is as much as to say that the only
word by which the soul can be at all
truly uttered is the word "unutterable.'
None of Us is entirely submerged in
everydayness. We come up for brief
flashes into the upper world of spirit now
and then, as fishes leap glancingly into
the air.
And as a fish cannot live in the upper
world of air, but must go back into water
20 breathe. so doubtless our life could not
endure any long stay in the too rare at
mosphere Of undiluted existence which
we find in these mysterious excursions.
| like to think of such moments as
flashes of our ineffable divinity. By such
impulses from within, as well as by the
miracles of nature without, we are con-
tinualy reminded Of our essential other
worldiness, and that after all we are but
strangers and pilgrims, whose native
heath is elsewhere.
AS we grow older this sense of strange
ness in our surroundings grows upon us;
things, men, events recede; something,
we know not what, something shadowy
vet very real seems approaching, as loom
| inc mountains seen in the evening hor-
ION from the steamer deck; until at last
the intimation becomes the actual, the IN
I.erval becomes the song, the hint becomes
understandable speech, the infinite, which
all along has rained scattered drops upon
| ne descends in an overwhelming Hood
and "the dewdrop slips into the shining
sea" we go home where we belong
Home Is the sailor home from the sex
! And the hunter home from Lhe mn
|