THE HYMN OF CREATION

Too Long; Didn't Read

The second chapter in Miss Miller’s work is entitled, “Gloire à Dieu. Poème onirique.” When twenty years of age, Miss Miller took a long journey through Europe. We leave the description of it to her: “After a long and rough journey from New York to Stockholm, from there to Petersburg and Odessa, I found it a true pleasure[60] to leave the world of inhabited cities—and to enter the world of waves, sky and silence—I stayed hours long on deck to dream, stretched out in a reclining chair. The histories, legends and myths of the different countries which I saw in the distance, came back to me indistinctly blended together in a sort of luminous mist, in which things lost their reality, while the dreams and thoughts alone took on somewhat the appearance of reality. At first, I even avoided all company and kept to myself, lost wholly in my dreams, where all that I knew of great, beautiful and good came back into my consciousness with new strength and new life. I also employed a great part of my time writing to my distant friends, reading and sketching out short poems about the regions visited. Some of these poems were of a very serious character.” It may seem superfluous, perhaps, to enter intimately into all these details. If we recall, however, the remark made above,—that when people let their unconscious speak, they always tell us the most important things of 50their intimate selves—then even the smallest detail appears to have meaning. Valuable personalities invariably tell us, through their unconscious, things that are generally valuable, so that patient interest is rewarded. Miss Miller describes here a state of “introversion.” After the life of the cities with their many impressions had been absorbing her interest (with that already discussed strength of suggestion which powerfully enforced the impression) she breathed freely upon the ocean, and after so many external impressions, became engrossed wholly in the internal with intentional abstraction from the surroundings, so that things lost their reality and dreams became truth. We know from psychopathology that certain mental disturbances[61] exist which are first manifested by the individuals shutting themselves off slowly, more and more, from reality and sinking into their phantasies, during which process, in proportion as the reality loses its hold, the inner world gains in reality and determining power.[62] This process leads to a certain point (which varies with the individual) when the patients suddenly become more or less conscious of their separation from reality. The event which then enters is the pathological excitation: that is to say, the patients begin to turn towards the environment, with diseased views (to be sure) which, however, still represent the compensating, although unsuccessful, attempt at transference.[63] The methods of reaction are, naturally, very different. I will not concern myself more closely about this here.