How Can I Not Love My Inner World

I have seen things in my inner world that feel so peculiarly beautiful, so complete, so alive, that I want to bring them across the border into ordinary life.

How can I not love such a world?

There are places in me that I have never visited with my feet, and yet I know them. There are woods whose paths seem older than my memory, existing since time immemorial. There are houses standing somewhere beyond ordinary geography, rooms with windows opening toward a light I cannot explain, roads that bend into places I have never seen and nevertheless recognize.

Sometimes I wander there for hours. My imaginative mind seems to have always possessed this tendency. It does not remain where the body has been placed. It wanders. It moves through strange uncanny landscapes, enters rooms, follows roads, descends into darkness, walks beneath trees, and suddenly comes upon some place that feels more familiar than places in which I have actually lived.

Then I return to the outer world. Yet often the wandering does not end there. I find myself seeking outwardly what I have already encountered inwardly. I go toward woods because there are woods in me. I am drawn toward certain houses because I have already dreamed houses like them. A particular road at dusk, an old upstairs room, a garden behind a wall, the shape of trees against the evening sky, these things can suddenly strike me with an uncanny familiarity.

Then I stand before them and wonder:

Have I come here because I once dreamed this place?

Or did the dream come because somewhere in me I was already longing for such a place?

I cannot tell.

Perhaps the inner and outer worlds sometimes approach one another so closely that one no longer knows which called first. There are dreams I have had that I want to live so badly that remembering them hurts me. I do not mean that I merely want to see the same walls again or find the same woman or reproduce every detail exactly as it appeared. It is something beneath this. There was a life in them. There was a particular air. A feeling of having arrived somewhere that did not need explanation.

Sometimes there was love. Sometimes a woman whose presence seemed to gather everything beautiful into one human form. Sometimes there was only a house, a room, the woods beyond a window, and the strange certainty that I belonged there.

Then morning came.

The image disappeared, but the longing remained. This is perhaps one of the strangest griefs: to miss something that one has never possessed.

What does one call the memory of a life that never happened?

Still I remember it. Still something in me says: I have been there. And another part answers: No, you have only dreamed.

But what a poor word only becomes before certain dreams.

There are dreams that vanish before breakfast and leave nothing behind. And there are others that seem to have placed a stone somewhere in the soul. Years pass around them. The outer life changes. Yet the stone remains.

Sometimes I consciously go looking for these images in the world. I walk into the woods and allow the paths to become strange. I travel toward places whose atmosphere resembles something I once saw inwardly. I enter old houses and look through windows. I wander until the ordinary world begins to acquire that faint dreamlike quality that makes it seem as though another world is standing immediately behind it.

Perhaps I am longing inwardly.

Perhaps I am remembering.

Perhaps I simply love to wander.

I do not know.

But when the outer place resembles the inner place, I feel a peculiar peace.

For a moment the border becomes thin. The world before my eyes and the world behind them seem to recognize one another. Then I understand why I could never despise imagination merely because it is imagination. I have lived too much there. I have loved there. I have been frightened there. I have entered places there that I would never have invented deliberately. I have awakened weeping because something beautiful had vanished with the night. There were mornings when the dream seemed cruel because it had shown me a life and then taken it away. Yet even then I could not hate it.

How can a thirsty man hate the spring because he cannot carry the whole spring home?

Perhaps this is why my inner world feels like water. I wander in it as one wanders through a river whose bottom cannot always be seen. Sometimes the water is clear. Sometimes it becomes dark. Sometimes strange things move beneath its surface.

Yet I return to it.

I return because it is there, and because some part of me seems native to it.

I have often wondered whether I love these inner places too much.

But this question itself seems strange to me.

One does not ask the bird why it loves the height.

One does not ask the fish why it enters the water again.

Perhaps man also has a native element that others cannot see. Mine seems filled with images. And when an image rises with sufficient life, I cannot treat it as a dead thing.

It looks back.

A dream can sometimes possess more atmosphere than an entire month of waking life. An imagined room can become more intimate than a room in which I have slept for years. A woman glimpsed in a dream can leave behind a tenderness that survives her face. A landscape that never existed can make the actual world seem, for a moment, like its distant relative.

Then I go outside and search without saying that I am searching. I walk. I travel. I enter the woods. I look at houses. I watch the light move across old walls.

And sometimes the world gives something back. Not the dream itself. Never exactly. But a resemblance. A fragment. A certain silence.

A window. A tree. The smell of wet earth. A woman turning her face toward me. A room in which I suddenly wish to remain.

Then the inner world seems to whisper through matter:

I have not left you.

And this is what I love most.