Lenny

                                                                          






Wretchedness is complex. The wretchedness of earth is diverse. Overextending the wide skyline as the rainbow, its tones are as different as the shades of that curve, - as particular as well, yet as personally mixed. Overextending the wide skyline as the rainbow! How is it that from magnificence I have inferred a sort of unattractiveness? - from the contract of harmony an analogy of distress? Yet, as, in morals, abhorrent is a result of good, along these lines, truth be told, out of bliss is distress conceived. Either the memory of past ecstasy is the anguish of to-day, or the miseries which are have their starting point in the joys which may have been.

There are no towers in the land additional respected than my bleak, dark, innate lobbies. Our line has been known as a race of visionaries; and in many striking points of interest - in the character of the family house - in the frescos of the central cantina - in the embroidered works of art of the residences - in the etching of certain braces in the ordnance - however more particularly in the display of old fashioned canvases - in the style of the library chamber - and, in conclusion, in the impossible to miss nature of the library's substance, there is more than adequate proof to warrant the conviction.

The memories of my soonest years are associated with that chamber, and with its volumes - of which last I will say no more. Here passed on my mom. Thus was I conceived. In any case, it is simple inertness to state that I had not lived previously - that the spirit has no past presence. You deny it? - let us not contend the issue. Persuaded myself, I look for not to persuade. There is, notwithstanding, a recognition of aeronautical structures - of profound and significance eyes - of sounds, melodic yet tragic - a recognition which won't be rejected; a memory like a shadow, obscure, variable, uncertain, insecure; and like a shadow, as well, in the inconceivability of my disposing of it while the daylight of my explanation will exist.

In that chamber was I conceived. In this manner getting up from the difficult night of what appeared, yet was not, nothing, without a moment's delay into the very locales of pixie land - into a royal residence of creative mind - into the wild territories of ascetic idea and intelligence - it isn't particular that I looked around me with a frightened and impassioned eye - that I dillydallied away my childhood in books, and dispersed my childhood in dream; yet it is solitary that as years rolled away, and the early afternoon of masculinity discovered me still in the manor of my dads - it is brilliant what stagnation there fell upon an incredible springs - great how absolute a reversal occurred in the character of my commonest thought. The substances of the world influenced me as dreams, and as dreams just, while the wild thoughts of the place where there is dreams became, thus, - not the material of my consistently presence but rather in very deed that presence totally and exclusively in itself.
Lenny and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my fatherly corridors. However diversely we developed - I sick of wellbeing, and covered in unhappiness - she dexterous, effortless, and flooding with vitality; hers the chatter the slope side - mine the investigations of the order - I living inside my very own heart, and dependent body and soul to the most exceptional and difficult reflection - she wandering recklessly through existence with no idea of the shadows in her way, or the quiet trip of the raven-winged hours. Lenny! - I call upon her name - Lenny! - and from the dark remains of memory a thousand turbulent memories.

I looked at her, the soul of progress cleared, over her, overrunning her psyche, her propensities, and her character, and, in a way the most inconspicuous and horrible, upsetting even the personality of her individual! Too bad! the destroyer went back and forth, and the person in question - where was she, I knew her not - or knew her no longer as Lenny.

Among the various train of illnesses superinduced by that lethal and essential one which affected an upset of so frightful a sort in the good and physical being of my cousin, might be referenced as the most upsetting and resolute in its temperament, a types of epilepsy not unfrequently ending in stupor itself - daze practically looking like positive disintegration, and from which her way of recuperation was in many examples, startlingly unexpected. Meanwhile my own infection - for I have been informed that I should call it by no other appelation - my own illness, at that point, developed quickly upon me, and expected at long last a monomaniac character of a novel and remarkable structure - hourly and momently picking up force - and finally acquiring over me the most endless domination. This monomania, on the off chance that I should so term it, comprised in a grim touchiness of those properties of the brain in supernatural science named the mindful. It is more than likely that I am not seen; yet I dread, for sure, that it is in no way conceivable to pass on to the psyche of the just broad peruser, a satisfactory thought of that anxious force of enthusiasm with which, for my situation, the forces of reflection (not to talk in fact) busied and covered themselves, in the consideration of even the most conventional objects of the universe.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my consideration bolted to some pointless gadget on the edge, or in the geology of a book; to get consumed for the majority of a mid year's day, in an interesting shadow falling aslant upon the woven artwork, or upon the entryway; to lose myself for a whole night in watching the consistent fire of a light, or the ashes of a fire; to dream away entire days over the aroma of a blossom; to rehash repetitively some regular word, until the sound, by dint of successive reiteration, stopped to pass on any thought whatever to the brain; to lose all feeling of movement or physical presence, by methods for supreme substantial calmness long and resolutely continued on in; - such were a couple of the most widely recognized and least malevolent notions prompted by a state of the intellectual capacities, not, to be sure, inside and out unrivaled, yet absolutely offering resistance to anything like examination or clarification.

However let me not be confused. - The undue, sincere, and grim consideration in this manner energized by objects in their very own temperament negligible, must not be perplexed in character with that ruminating affinity normal to all humankind, and all the more particularly enjoyed by people of passionate creative mind. It was not even, as may be from the start assumed, an outrageous condition or embellishment of such inclination, yet fundamentally and basically unmistakable and unique. In the one occasion, the visionary, or aficionado, being intrigued by an article for the most part not pointless, subtly dismisses this item in a wild of findings and recommendations giving in this manner, until, at the decision of a fantasy frequently packed with extravagance, he finds the incitamentum or first reason for his insights altogether evaporated and overlooked. For my situation the essential article was perpetually paltry, albeit expecting, through the mechanism of my distempered vision, a refracted and unbelievable significance. Barely any findings, assuming any, were made; and those couple of pertinaciously returning in upon the first article as an inside. The reflections were rarely pleasurable; and, at the end of the dream, the primary reason, so distant from being far out, had accomplished that extraordinarily misrepresented intrigue which was the overarching highlight of the ailment. In a word, the forces of mind all the more especially practiced were, with me, as I have said previously, the mindful, and are, with the daydreamer, the theoretical.

My books, at this age, in the event that they didn't really serve to aggravate the confusion, shared, it will be seen, to a great extent, in their creative and insignificant nature, of the trademark characteristics of the turmoil itself.


Hence it will give the idea that, shaken from its parity just by minor things, my explanation looked somewhat like that sea ridge, which consistently opposing the assaults of human brutality, and the fiercer anger of the waters and the breezes, trembled distinctly to the dash of the bloom called. Also, despite the fact that, to a reckless mastermind, it may seem an issue certain, that the change delivered by her despondent illness, in the ethical state of Lenny, would manage the cost of me numerous articles for the activity of that extreme and irregular reflection whose nature I experience been at some difficulty in clarifying, yet such was in no degree the case. In the clear interims of my ailment, her disaster, without a doubt, gave me torment, and, acknowledging profoundly that all out wreck of her reasonable and delicate life, I didn't tumble to contemplate as often as possible and sharply upon the miracle working methods by which so stran