The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

By: London, Jack

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of otherpersons in me.-Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into yourchildhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience ofyour childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, aconsciousness and an identity in the process of forming-ay, of forming and forgetting.You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you remember dimlythe hazy vistas of other times and places into which your child eyes peered. They seemdreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance ofthem? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of oursheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fellgreat heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexedby crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, sawother faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than youknow now, looking back, you ever looked upon.Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-lifeness, of things that youhad never seen in this particular world of your particular life. Then whence? Otherlives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will havereceived answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that you yourself, ereyou came to read me, propounded to yourself.* * * * *Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man like you or anyman. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most aptly stated it in his passagethat begins "Not in utter nakedness, not in entire forgetfulness. . ."Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born things, and all too soondo we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we did remember other times andplaces. We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed ourdreams of air-flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears ofdim and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience.As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a period that I still madehunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then did I know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped the word "king," remembered that I had once been the son ofa king. More-I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and worn aniron collar round my nec

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08RR5FS5X
• ISBN13: 9798587328976
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 8.0"