Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

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Title: Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
Author: George MacDonald
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5773] [Yes, we are more than one
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ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBOURHOOD.
BY GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.
NEW YORK

CHAPTER I
.
DESPONDENCY AND CONSOLATION.

Before I begin to tell you some of the things I have seen and heard, in
both of which I have had to take a share, now from the compulsion of
my office, now from the leading of my own heart, and now from that
destiny which, including both, so often throws the man who supposed
himself a mere on-looker, into the very vortex of events--that destiny
which took form to the old pagans as a gray mist high beyond the heads
of their gods, but to us is known as an infinite love, revealed in the
mystery of man--I say before I begin, it is fitting that, in the absence of
a common friend to do that office for me, I should introduce myself to
your acquaintance, and I hope coming friendship. Nor can there be any
impropriety in my telling you about myself, seeing I remain concealed
behind my own words. You can never look me in the eyes, though you
may look me in the soul. You may find me out, find my faults, my
vanities, my sins, but you will not SEE me, at least in this world. To
you I am but a voice of revealing, not a form of vision; therefore I am
bold behind the mask, to speak to you heart to heart; bold, I say, just so

much the more that I do not speak to you face to face. And when we
meet in heaven--well, there I know there is no hiding; there, there is no
reason for hiding anything; there, the whole desire will be alternate
revelation and vision.
I am now getting old--faster and faster. I cannot help my gray hairs, nor
the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no, nor the quaver that
will come in my voice, not the sense of being feeble in the knees, even
when I walk only across the floor of my study. But I have not got used
to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom older than I did at three-and-twenty.
Nay, to tell all the truth, I feel a good deal younger.--For then I only felt
that a man had to take up his cross; whereas now I feel that a man has
to follow Him; and that makes an unspeakable difference.--When my
voice quavers, I feel that it is mine and not mine; that it just belongs to
me like my watch, which does not go well-now, though it went well
thirty years ago--not more than a minute out in a month. And when I
feel my knees shake, I think of them with a kind of pity, as I used to
think of an old mare of my father's of which I was very fond when I
was a lad, and which bore me across many a field and over many a
fence, but which at last came to have the same weakness in her knees
that I have in mine; and she knew it too, and took care of them, and so
of herself, in a wise equine fashion. These things are not me--or _I_, if
the grammarians like it better, (I always feel a strife between doing as
the scholar does and doing as other people do;) they are not me, I say; I
HAVE