Across the Unknown
Description
the
Unknown
(1939)
by Stewart Edward White
From the Author of The Betty Book, Stewart E. White's popular works have been included in our Historic Reprints: Across the Unknown...
The Struggle of each generation is the interpretation of the whispered allotment of wisdom into the current vernacular. You are at the turning of a great tide. Who is there to offer guidance in the age-proven technique of living, and yet point ahead to the regions we are appointed to explore? We arraign your generation for its failure to establish faith in the proven laws of living. Will you not voice it in this book of yours? Let honest conviction ring out; and strike a new note of responsibility.
CURIOUS how we acquire wisdom! Over and over again the same truth is thrust under our very noses. We encounter it in action; we are admonished of it; we read it in the written word. We suffer the experience, we graciously assent to the advice; we approve, intellectually, the written word. But nothing happens inside us.
'The Acts of your days on days make a certain-shaped thing of you. Then in the rhythm of life the influences too big for control strike a sharp blow or stroke or influence or vibration of some kind, that overcomes your own plan or sense of direction. And this same stroke arranges your relationships quite automatically. Suddenly you fit into the place where the thing you shaped will go with mathematical nicety. It is as though a lot of scattered things were dancing about; and Clap! they were all in a pattern. You call it fate, or luck, or destiny, but all the time it is just the preparation of your days on days...'
Excerpt from the Preface:
What an awful region of words I've come to! I don't like them; they're just empty clamshells standing for things that aren't there!
I am greatly handicapped by my seeing the subject. Seeing the subject makes it too big for the words, and they stumble.
Then one day some trivial experience or word or encounter stops us short. A gleam of illumination penetrates the depth of our consciousness. We see! Usually it is but a glimpse; but on rare occasion a brilliant flash reveals truth fully formed. And we marvel that this understanding has escaped us so long.
For months, literally, the Invisibles hammered away at my dullness. Not that I occupied the whole stage of their attention! They had Betty's education to attend to; and there was also the structure of the teachings to be defined. But I was part of the job; and they kept at me. And always the same line of attack.
"Make the leap," they urged. "Dare to do it. Take a chance on our being night. You cannot connect up in an unbroken series of steps with what you know. This reality is not on the outskirts; a gap must be bridged. Lay aside at intervals the measuring stick of your mind. It is very necessary to employ the measuring stick ordinarily; but lay it aside intermittently. Hurl yourself into space, as it were. It will not hurt you to go bravely out to pick up a clue or two. You've been trying to creep up on things on the scientific side, but they've got to be boldly taken, artistically, in the present case, Conservatism travels so slowly. Radicalism suffers for its blunders, but arrives with force."
Paperback, 5 x 8, 270+ pages
