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William Gerhardie - Resurrection

But why this exultation, this extreme, unreasonable happiness ?

Because I can isolate each moment, savour it, dwell in it, as I could not do in the past when, ignorant that each moment was a moment independent and separate from the next, I wasted my life jolting from moment to moment, surrendering my soul to transition, not living at all.

There is the same atmosphere, the dark wallpaper, the big clock, the smell of oak, everything is there. Everything which at the time had jarred by its irrelevance and now testifies to the fragrant life of a moment reclaimed from the desert waste of Time.

My father, who looks like a moustached President Wilson, eats his food like one loathing and struggling with his executioners. I look at him and think : the man is rich.  Why then doesn't he fill all his cupboards with chocolates ?  But-I am also watching the boy who thinks this : it seems to me unreasonable that my father should not folllow this course.  And it also seems reasonable that I should in the circumstances think as I do....................

I could now overtake the millions of untenanted bodies once mine, and tune in with them. Catch up with the waves, the vibrations which made me-millions of them; catch up, identify myself, or stand a little beside and outside, as a singer might listen to his own record or join in if he wished. Like two tuning-forks tuned to the same pitch, we both vibrated with the familiar but forgotten feelings of the past. And in so far as I took possession of one or the other of the milliard forms I had been at this or that instant of my past I was reliving the authentic moment, not merely recalling it. But in so far as I realized that I was not tied to it but could withdraw at will, I was enabled to lend it the concentrated attention of a spectator not fatally involved, and therefore revelling in the nuances which now completed and enriched the sensation where formerly they irritated and pained by their apparent
irrelevance to - the impending purpose, the task in hand.

Time ran at right angles on this new found dimensional plane. It ran at odd angles on the further plane. Space, too.

And so I could appreciate space and time as interpenetrable and near at hand, and there was no distance I had to go to overtake the army of William Gerhardis marching away in single file, while I hovered over them like a hawk choosing his prey.