The Palms Art Gallery

"Breaking across the phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is not in time. It is eternity." -

ALGERNON BLACK WOOD

Was so misunderstood that folks thought he was writing horror stories.

Because of this when he was broke he did on a few occasions write horror stories to feed him self.

But Mr. Blackwood loved all of creation, and all of the romantic love and color in it. One publisher said

"the man has simply sold his soul to nature"

Mr. Blackwood remarked once, "give me a golden afternoon, Childs voices, happy mothers, work  tiered fathers and the promise of a safe night's sleep for all, and I will show you paradise"

Eventually in spite of his distractors he would write the horror story of all horror storys, THE WILLOWS that all writers, movie producer's and magizine editors agree is simply the most terrifying  storie of all time, but mostly he wrote spiritual uplifting stories like this one

"THE GOLDEN FLY"

It has made many a person sober up and look life in the eye and say thank you.

Just as we here at the palms say thank you

Mr. Blackwood

our lives are so much better because you came along.

YOU ARE SO VERY RIGHT, GRATITUDE IS THE ATTATUDE

The Golden Fly

by Algernon Blackwood

It fell upon him out of a clear sky just when existence

seemed on its very best behaviour, and he savagely

resented the undeserved affliction of it.

Involving him in an atrocious scandal that reflected

directly upon his honour, it destroyed in a moment

the erection his entire life had so laboriously built up

—his reputation. In the eyes of the world he was a

broken, discredited man, at the very moment,

moreover, when his most cherished ambitions

touched fulfilment. And the cruelty of it appalled his

sense of justice, for it was impossible to vindicate

himself without inculpating others who were dearer

to him than life. It seemed more than he could bear;

and the grim course he contemplated—decision itself

as yet hung darkly waiting in the background—

appeared the only way of escape that offered.

He had discussed the matter with friends until his

brain whirled. Their sympathy maddened him, with

hints of qui s’excuse s’accuse, and he turned at last in

desperation to something that could not answer back.

For the first time in his life he turned to Nature—to

that dead, inanimate Nature he had left to poets and

rhapsodising women: ‘I must face it alone,’ he put it.

For the Finger of God was a phrase without meaning

to him, and his entire being contained no trace of the

religious instinct. He was a business man, honest,

selfish, and ambitious; and the collapse of his worldly

position was paramount to the collapse of the universe

itself—his universe, at any rate. This ‘crumbling

of the universe’ was the thought he took out with him.

He left the house by the path that led into solitude,

and reached the heathery expanse that formed one of

the breathing-places of the New Forest. There he

flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little

pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down with

him, for he could not escape it.

Taking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it

hurt him, he lay upon his back and watched the

clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared into the

sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his eyes; he

smelt the heather-honey; golden flies hung motionless

in the air, like coloured pins fastening the sunshine

against the blue curtain of the summer, while

dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove across its pattern

pattern

their threads of gleaming bronze. He heard the

petulant crying of the peewits, and watched their

tumbling flight. Below him tinkled a rivulet, its brown

water rippling between banks of peaty earth. Everywhere

was singing, peace, and careless unconcern.

And this lordly indifference of Nature calmed and

soothed him. Neither human pain nor the injustice of

man could shift the key of the water, alter the peewits’

cry a single tone, nor influence one fraction of an inch

those cloudy frigates of vapour that sailed the sky. The

earth bulged sunwards as she had bulged for centuries.

The power of her steady gait, superbly calm,

breathed everywhere with grandeur—undismayed,

unhasting, and supremely confident.… And, like the

flash of those golden flies, there leaped suddenly

upon him this vivid thought: that his world of agony

lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his

own brain. Outside himself it had no existence at all.

His mind contained it—the minute interior he called

his heart. From this vaster world about him it lay

utterly apart, like deeds in the black boxes of

japanned tin he kept at the office, shut off from the

universe, huddled in an overcrowded space within his

skull.How this commonplace thought reached him,

garbed in such startling novelty, was odd enough; for

it seemed as though the fierceness of his pain had

burned away something. His thoughts it merely

enflamed; but this other thing it consumed. Something

that had obscured clear vision shrivelled before

it as a piece of paper, eaten up by fire, dwindles down

into a thimbleful of unimportant ashes. The thicket of

his mind grew half transparent. At the farther end he

saw, for the first time—light. The perspective of his

inner life, hitherto so enormous, telescoped into the

proportions of a miniature. Just as momentous and

significant as before, it was somehow abruptly different—

seen from another point of view. The suffering

had burned up rubbish he himself had piled over the

head of a little Fact. Like a point of metal that glows

yet will not burn, he discerned in the depths of him

the essential shining fact that not all this ruinous conflagration

could destroy. And this brilliant, indestructible

kernel was—his Innocence. The rest was

self-reared rubbish: opinion of the world. He had

magnified an atom into a universe.…

Pain, as it seemed, had cleared a way for the sublimity

of Nature to approach him. The calm old Universe

rolled past. The deep, majestic Day gave him a

push, as though the shoulder of some star had

brushed his own. He had thought his feelings were

the world : instead, they were merely his way of looking

at it. The actual ‘world’ was some glorious,

unchanging thing he never saw direct. His attitude of

mind was but a peephole into it. The choice of his particular

peephole, moreover, lay surely within the

power of his individual will. The anguish, centred

upon so small a point, had seemed to affect the entire

spread universe around him, whereas in reality it

affected nothing but his attitude of mind towards it.

The truism struck him like a blow between the eyes,

that a man is what he thinks or feels himself to be. It

leaped the barrier between words and meaning. The

intellectual concept became a hard-edged fact,

because he realised it—for the first time in his very

circumscribed life. And this dreadful pain that had

made even suicide seem desirable was entirely a fabrication

of his own mind. The universe about him

rolled on just the same in the majesty of its eternal

purpose. His tiny inner world was clouded, but the

glory of this stupendous world about him was

undimmed, untroubled, unaffected. Even death

itself…

With a swift smash of the hand he crushed the

golden fly that settled on his knee. The murder was

done impulsively, utterly without intention. He

watched the little point of gold quiver for a moment

among the hairs of the rough tweed; then lie still for

ever … but the scent of heather-honey filled the air as

before; the wind passed sighing through the pines; the

clouds still sailed their uncharted sea of blue. There

lay the whole spread surface of the Forest in the sun.

Only the attitude of the golden fly towards it all was

gone. A single, tiny point of view had disappeared.

Nature passed on calmly and unhasting; she took no

note.Then, with a rush of awe, another thought flashed

through him: Nature had taken note. There was a difference

everywhere. Not a sparrow falleth, he

remembered, without God knowing. God was certainly

in Nature somewhere. His clumsy senses could

not register this difference, yet it was there. His own

small world, fed by these senses, was after all the

merest little corner of Existence. To the whole of

Existence, that included himself, the golden fly, the

sun, and all the stars, he must somehow answer for his

crime. It was a wanton interference with a sublime

and sovereign Purpose that he now divined for the

first time. He looked at the wee point of gold lying

still and silent in the forest of hairs. He realised the

enormity of his act. It could not have been graver had

he put out the sun, or the little, insignificant flame of

his own existence. He had done a criminal, evil thing,

for he had put an end to a certain point of view; had

wiped it out; made it impossible. Had the fly been

quicker, less easily overwhelmed, or more tenacious of

the scrap of universal life it used, Nature would at this

instant be richer for its little contribution to the whole

of things—to which he himself also belonged. And

wherein, he asked himself, did he differ from that fly

in the importance, the significance of his contribution

to the universe? The soul … ? He had never given the

question a single thought; but if the scrap of life he

owned was called a soul, why should that point of

golden glory not comprise one too? Its minute size, its

trivial purpose, its few hours of apparently futile existence

… these formed no true criterion … !

Similarly, the thought rushed over him, a Hand

was being stretched out to crush himself. His pain was

the shadow of its approach; anger in his heart, the

warning. Unless he were quick enough, adroit and

skilled enough, he also would be wiped out, while

Nature continued her slow, unhasting way without

him. His attitude towards the personal pain was really

the test of his ability, of his merit—of his right to survive.

Pain teaches, pain develops, pain brings growth:

he had heard it since his copybook days. But now he

realised it, as again thought leaped the barrier

between familiar words and meaning. In his attitude

of mind to his catastrophe lay his salvation or his ...

death.

In some such confused and blundering fashion,

because along unaccustomed channels, the truth

charged into him to overwhelm, yet bringing with it

an unwonted sense of joy that seemed to break a crust

which long had held back—life. Thus tapped, these

sources gushed forth and bubbled over, spread about

his being, flooded him with hope and courage, above

all with—calmness. Nature held forces just as real and

living as human sympathy, and equally able to modify

the soul. And Nature was always accessible. A sense of

huge companionship, denied him by the littleness of

his fellow-men, stole sweetly over him. It was amazingly

uplifting, yet fear came close behind it, as he

realised the presumption of his former attitude of

cynical indifference. These Powers were aware of his

petty insolence, yet had not crushed him.... It was, of

course, the awakening of the religious instinct in a

man who hitherto had worshipped merely a rather

low-grade form of intellect.

And, while the enormous confusion of it shook

him, this sense of incommunicable sweetness

remained. Bright haunting eyes, with love in them,

gazed at him from the blue; and this thing that came

so close, stood also far away upon the line of the horizon.

It was everywhere. It filled the hollows, but

towered over him as well towards the pinnaces of

cloud. It was in the sharpness of the peewits’ cry, and

in the water’s murmur. It whispered in the pineboughs,

and blazed in every patch of sunlight. And it

was glory, pure and simple. It filled him with a sense

of strength for which he could find but one description—

Triumph.

And so, first, the anger faded from his mind and

crept away. Resentment then slunk after it. Revolt and

disappointment also melted, and bitterness gave place

to the most marvellous peace the man had ever

known. Then came resignation to fill the empty

places. Pain, as a means and not an end, had cleared

the way, though the accomplishment was like a miracle.

But Conversion is a miracle. No ordinary pain

can bring it. This anguish he understood now in a new

relation to life—as something to be taken willingly

into himself and dealt with, all regardless of public

opinion. What people said and thought was in their

world, not in his. It was less than nothing. The pain

cultivated dormant tracts. The terror also purged. It

disclosed.…

He watched the wind, and even the wind brought

revelation; for without obstacles in its path it would

be silent. He watched the sunshine, and the sunshine

taught him too; for without obstacles to fling it back

against his eye, he could never see it. He would

neither hear the tinkling water nor feel the summer

heat unless both one and other overcame some reluctant

medium in their pathways. And, similarly with his

moral being—his pain resulted from the friction of his

personal ambitions against the stress of some noble

Power that sought to lift him higher. That Power he

could not know direct, but he recognised its strain

against him by the resistance it generated in the inertia

of his selfishness. His attitude of mind had

switched completely round. It was what the preachers

termed development through suffering.

Moreover, he had acquired this energy of resistance

somehow from the wind and sun and the beauty

of a common summer’s day. Their peace and strength

had passed into himself. Unconsciously on his way

home he drew upon it steadily. He tossed the pistol

into a pool of water. Nature had healed him; and

Nature, should he turn weak again, was always there.

It was very wonderful. He wanted to sing.…

FOUND IN THE DIARY OF A RICH FARMER WHO DIED AT 97