The Jacket

CHAPTER I.

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have beenaware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my readerthat is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness Ispeak of will be remembered as an experience of your childhood. You were thennot fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousnessand 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, youremember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your childeyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamedthen, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded ofthe things we know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of ourexperience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; youdreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed bycrawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard othervoices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises andsunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-lifeness, ofthings that you had never seen in this particular world of your particularlife. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds? Perhaps, when you have read allthat I shall write, you will have received answers to the perplexities I havepropounded to you, and that you yourself, ere you came to read me, propoundedto yourself.

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man likeyou or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But h

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