What a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!
What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries!
And the privacy of it all!
A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.
A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can.
A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do.
An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all一 Julian Jaynes
I re-read these lines over when I’m feeling a bit like a Miss Havisham of the Mind. We are so feeble yet so hopeful and weary. An impossible thing to let someone into the state of your own mind. But the romantic imagines the sort of being that one day falls over the garden wall, helps himself to breakfast at your table
and remarking through a shower of toasted bread crumbs,
“What a whimsical sense of decay you have given this place.”
