Barrie in Love X

Barrie in Love X

In his idyllic fairytale world of Peter Pan, a young cock and a man are kin, all of nature is related. The dead Osiris is resurrected in the dead Christ, and the phenomenal world is revealed as the transcendental world, the world of eternity.

Simply to live in a body, to live as a mortal human being—surely this is enough, and this is everything. Only a man who had come close to dying himself and who had despaired of his efforts to transform the human world could have written a book like this, in awed celebration of the wonders of the natural world.

The man who had died looked nakedly onto life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests. Foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, Peter Pan a young cock, and Captain Hook hot in pursuit.

They came forth, these creations of Barrie’s imagination glowing with desire and with assertion. The man who had died looked on the great swing into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer his own tremulous desire to exist and to be.

He heard instead their ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing .... And always, the man who had died saw not Peter Pan alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which Peter was the crest.

He watched the queer, sullen motion of the creature....