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 



