40 PSYCHOLOGICAL PUZZLES 



if I could have encaged them, but I couldn't; trap 

 them I did, but they were too many, too elusive, so 

 that I no sooner gripped them in my hands than they 

 slipped through my fingers and were gone. I really 

 think that if I could have devised some means of 

 recording them, if I had had any idea of such a thing, 

 they would have presented a strong contrast to the 

 stodgy stuff I am obliged to put in my books since 

 I started book-writing or book-making. The difference 

 in the movement of my mind on these rides in the 

 wind and now, sitting in a chair with paper and pens 

 on a table in front of me, is, as I put it before, like 

 the flight of a bird through the air — a sparrow-hawk, 

 let us say, that flashes into sight over the trees on 

 swift-beating wings and is instantly gone — and walk- 

 ing in heavy boots over a newly-ploughed field of 

 stiff clay, saturated with last night's heavy rains. 



Why and how did the wind affect me in this way ? 

 It is one of the innumerable puzzles, problems, 

 mysteries, one is eternally stumbling against. Like 

 everybody else, I am like an infant in the night crying 

 for the light, and with no language but a cry. And 

 answer there comes none. For what do we know — 

 and what do we know — what do we really and truly 

 know about what a friend of mine will insist on calling 

 our " insides " ? Meaning not our lights, livers and 

 other organs, but that part of us where the mysteries 

 are. For we do know a lot about our insides accord- 

 ing to the physiologists and psychologists, yet they 

 can't tell me why the wind had the effect of trans- 

 forming me into a new and different being, one as 



